A King of Ash and Fire
by Lady Sophia of Arda
Summary: "And though... love is now mingled with grief, it still grows, perhaps the greater." Thorin Oakenshield has survived the Battle of the Five Armies, but at a grievous cost. His road home from a period of self-exile in the Shire will be anything but a mere journey Eastward. It will be his second chance at life, and his first at love. Thorin/OC. Post BOFTA AU.
1. SEDE VACANTE

SEDE VACANTE

_There lies his crown in water deep_

_ 'Til Durin wakes again from sleep_

The king woke quietly at the breaking of day. It seemed he had woken so many days before in this same pastoral quiet that time was slowly losing its meaning. He tried to remember the sound of metal, the clanging and clacking on stone, or the thick subterranean quiet deep in the mountain halls he had been born to. By now he had become used to the thrush-songs and the bubbling of the streams that passed through the little hills of this place, Hobbiton, as if it were primal to him.

By its very name it was not the home of a dwarf, and certainly not a king. For a spell though- until that very morning in fact- it was precisely that for Thorin Oakenshield, the most peculiar of any wayfaring stranger to have come to the Shire in some time.

The hobbit, by his gentle nature, was not an early riser. Sunup came and still he slept, in the bedroom next to Thorin's. Bilbo had long yielded him the best bedroom in Bag-End, as he had done however reluctantly at their first meeting, so long ago it seemed. The bed in Thorin's room was a quaint piece of furniture, with many quilts laid about it, all shades of carnelian, goldenrod and fern. It groaned beneath the dwarf's stocky frame. In the room there was a wash table and armoire, a writing desk with a fat-cushioned armchair, and a small round window that faced the sun and let in the morning light.

He could hear the fussy hobbit padding about in the kitchen, grumbling to himself about Sackville-Bagginses and chips in his glasses. Bilbo Baggins took his food, and the cozy décor of his home, quite seriously.

None in the Shire took him for anything more than an injured blacksmith from Ered Luin, who lodged with Mister Baggins out of queer preference perhaps. The hobbit had never married despite many offers, as one of the wealthiest citizens of Hobbiton. For this perhaps, none brought their opinions of his odd character to Mister Baggins directly.

Thorin Oakenshield had lived nameless among them. He was called the Blacksmith or The Dwarf alternately, or if one was so emboldened, the special guest at the Baggins hole, a peculiar souvenir from Bilbo's adventures, which he protected with curious aplomb. Of course, nobody had inquired directly of The Dwarf's origin to Bilbo, as he had come back from his adventure cagier than ever. Bilbo Baggins was still a respectable hobbit, if a slightly eccentric one, a funny Tookish thing they reckoned, and left it at that. None knew that Bag End housed this king in exile, scarred by worse things than goblins, wargs or trolls. Above that field full of dead, the Lonely Mountain lay stuffed to its hilts in gold with an empty throne. It would have been his throne, rightful, unquestioned. It would have been his, and when he passed, Fili's. But Fili was dead. The battle had claimed him, and Kili with him, the younger barely old enough to have fought at all- but he had, and bravely they said. And of Durin's sons then there were no more.

There was King Thorin, his life spared, but by threads. He could not bring himself to claim what was his, either the throne or the gold. Even if he had been in the correct mind to reason in the wake of that terrible battle, his decision would have been the same. Gandalf, anyhow, hadn't given him much of a choice.

The morning tea sent its sweet aroma to Thorin's room. He could remain no longer.

It was time to leave the Shire. The mountain was calling him home, surely as the sun rose at dawn and set at dusk.

Bilbo prepared preserves and fat loaves of bread for the morning meal. The leanness he'd attained on the journey had been short-lived, for the hobbit was now plump as ever, the buttons at his trousers in need of constant replacement. He pattered down the steps from the smial. The dwarf king considered his words but they caught in his throat, noting the hobbit's flattened affect. Bilbo Baggins's emotions ran from exasperated to moderately cheerful, never somber.

"I shall miss your company, burglar. I have had no truer friend in this corner of the world, nor any it seems."

"You were not meant to stay here forever."

Thorin sighed, taking in the fresh air of the Shire in morning. "The line of Durin has all but gone."

Bilbo's mouth was pulled down into a tight frown. The depths of Thorin's doubts had never been shared with any save him. He reached out quietly and touched the dwarf's shoulder, coming about to face him. "It is all _but _gone."

Minty the Second of Her Name stomped about impatiently at the tether. "Now before that wretched pony tears up my fence, get on your way." Thorin purposely ignored the crystalline tears in Bilbo's eyes. In the heavy-heartedness of both their faces they acknowledged a possible and quite wrenching truth- that they would never meet again.

"I ride to Bree. There, _Mahal_ willing, I shall find them. If it is rumor, then I carry on East on my own."

A messenger had arrived in the Shire not a week before, bearing news of a dwarf-company lodging near Bree, who spoke of a dead king risen from the grave. It had alarmed some enough so that the news carried about Hobbiton briskly. Messengers often came through the Shire bearing reports from the outside world, where hobbits were not always inclined to participate in most happenings about Middle Earth directly. Now, hobbits had no kings but dead kings returning to life one supposed could turn into a matter of great concern.

Thorin could only surmise being been spotted by a keen eye, perhaps a caravan of dwarves from Ered Luin passing thru the Shire, as they were many in coming these days, headed eastward toward the Lonely Mountain. Or a Raven, sharp eyed, ever-watchful creatures. A carrier of portents, some prophecy, as they were inclined to do. Thorin Oakenshield took it as a sign that the reign of the beast was at an end, and it was not Smaug he thought of in that matter.

The messenger himself was a dwarf, a merchant traveler whose hand-carved pipes were currently delighting the Hobbit population. And he had been to The East; the dwarf said that a gray wizard had seen a lost king home, Thrain son of Thror, and they buried him in the Lonely Mountain beside his grandsons.

The circle came' round again thusly. For it had been Thorin once, wandering aimlessly in the rocky plains in all directions from Bree, in search of another king he had thought risen from a proverbial grave. His own father, that very king at long last lain in peace.

Now it was his turn.

"Farewell Bilbo Baggins. Merry we shall meet again," Thorin looked down toward Bilbo and nodded, graciously. "Should you endeavor another adventure to the East, an esteemed guest you will be in my halls."

"Nonsense!" Bilbo puffed. "I've had quite enough of adventures!" The hobbit followed Thorin to the end of his garden-path as the king rode away.

Just as quickly as Thorin Oakenshield faded from sight he retreated back indoors, so the passing Proudfoots could not see his tears.

Thorin traveled alone on the road for some time. Men and hobbits passed him, paying him little heed. It was not uncommon to see dwarves in these times, and even a lone dwarf attracted little attention. Dwarves were moving in jarring numbers, their long exile at last come to an end. Out of their mountain halls and onto the plains and jagged valleys of Eriador they went, their world, for the first time in many years, filled with fresh hope.

The world seemed still and unchanged. It looked very much the same the last time he'd seen it, these relatively quiet Western parts being unchanged in general, even over many years. He was halfway across the Brandywine Bridge when he saw Dwalin and Balin halt on the other end.

As they did, Thorin came down from Minty the Second's mount and pushed back the hood of his traveling cloak.

"Thorin…"

Balin came across the bridge tenuously, Dwalin a few steps behind and even more hesitant. Balin approached first and raised his hands to Thorin's shoulders; he was so tall for a dwarf it was unmistakable.

"Thorin…" Lightly, Balin's eyes were misted. "My eyes deceive me." He moved his heavy grip to Thorin's forearm and found him still solid, as if he had not expected to. And the old dwarf began to weep. Thorin grasped him and touched his forehead to Balin's. "I'm sorry." When he turned to Dwalin, Dwalin had already bowed low on one knee to him. "You bow so low to me when you have no reason to." Thorin placed a hand upon his shoulder, for the burly dwarf looked close to tears (and what a sight that was!). "My old friend. Forgive me," half-gasped Thorin, before Dwalin's massive arms were flung around him. "_Nadad._"

Dwalin's breath went in and out in hot plumes against him. He was crushed against the dwarf's leather-clad chest. Dwalin held him back suddenly, checking him up and down steadily with heavy eyes that would not, even for him, allow a tear to pass, in spite of the watersheds Thorin saw forming just under their crests. Dwalin was still Dwalin.

"I will explain everything, in time," Thorin assured.

"We buried you in the mountain. I saw you to your tomb," faltered Dwalin.

"The sarcophagus was empty, Dwalin. Gandalf-"

"The wizard knew this?! By my beard, I'll pull out his!"

"All things are done as they must be," interjected Balin.

Balin looked into the king's eyes, cast sideways over the flowing water as they were, and saw emptiness. It was a familiar emptiness, a weary gaze that his king had worn often enough before. But not death. There was still a glimmer of life in those eyes. It lifted something fearful out of Balin, for that time at least.

"For the grief I have caused, I have no words," Thorin lamented quietly. The three dwarves stood in silence for a long moment that felt eternal in its weight. Balin broke it, gently.

"We all had a debt. You, my king, have paid yours. Now let us go home."

The king summoned Minty from her station at the end of the bridge. Dwalin rode close beside him as they returned to the road. "If it meant risking death to travel overland again, I had to see with my own eyes," Dwalin said, heavily.

"How?"

"A raven came to us," answered Balin. "A clever creature send to the West beside you, tasked by the wizard to bring you home when it was time."

"The raven came to me, on a day when we had cleared debris from the royal chambers, and I sat in your old nursery, weeping, thinking of you as a babe in the cradle. It flapped and flapped its wings as birds will do when they become trapped beneath the mountain. And it relayed the message thusly when I tried to free it. We started West within days."

"I would call you a fool, but I am glad for your company now." He smiled the forced smile that both Dwalin and Balin knew too well, however sparingly they had seen it.

"We have all come to see you home. They shan't be far," Balin smiled, reassuringly.

They followed the Old Forest Road, until they came to a large, rambling caravan of dwarves halted and cooling their heels along the shoulders of the road. The company, Thorin had assumed, had meant their compatriots from the conquest of Erebor. All had volunteered for this new unexpected journey, save for Bombur, recovering from battle-wounds that rendered him useless over long distances. Gloin too remained at the Lonely Mountain, fearing raids and the plundering hands of men and elves, though the treasure had long been fairly divided among them. Gloin knew the value of their holdings well enough to know that fair counted for little in a king-less kingdom.

Indeed it was the old brotherhood in this train, and they were lodged among a company who were decidedly not brothers.

"You may be glad to know we will have traveling company. The dwarves of Erebor and others are coming east out of Ered Luin, more each day. We have discussed the matter and found it prudent to join our companies in this journey."

Thorin studied the caravan. Balin went on. "They are dwarrowdams mostly. The men have gone ahead of them in search of work and lodging. Why, it would seem there is a dwarrowdam now for every _two _dwarves in Ered Luin. Imagine!"

"Indeed," Thorin mused quietly. "Most peculiar."

Balin mustered a smile. "The kin of Bombur and Gloin move with them, among others. We will not be in the company of strangers."

The caravan took no note of his arrival, engaged as its members seemed in this brief respite, kvetching, watering their pack animals. Wagons were loaded heavily but some traveled only with ponies or ibexes and rams to bear their belongings. There was a llama which he recognized as belonging to Bombur's daughters. Had it been so many years? They seemed only small girls when he left Ered Luin with their father to reclaim Erebor. His head swam a bit, trying to make sense of the time and space that had seemed infinite and slow-moving for so many months now. Like a pony lurching into a gallop, it started up again.

Psychically, he was compressing it down to nothing. It had seemed only yesterday that…

_Fili, Kili, Oin, Gloin, Balin, Dwalin-_

"Dwarrowdams are a risk," Dwalin grumbled under his breath.

"There is strength in numbers regardless," Balin retorted. "And they are a disciplined bunch, early to rise and steady to move. Every one of these women can wield a weapon if needed. They are led by that woman there."

Thorin squinted at the squall of dwarf women. "Which one?"

"The one without a beard."


	2. DUNININH

**DISCLAIMER**: All rights belong to J.R.R. Tolkien. No CR infringement intended. I own only my OC's which have no basis in canon. Any characters that can remotely be considered canon belong to J.R.R. Tolkien.

**A/N**: This is a fic I have been working on for about a year and a half but haven't gotten around to posting. It is quite sprawling at this point and I aim to piece it together meaningfully, over time. Part of my own "healing process" over canon-Thorin is to create an AU where he experiences something truly pure and good, which is the woman that he comes to love against all odds (because everything can't be perfect). This is the story of their lives, but it is also the story of Erebor in a "what if" universe. And it's a story about dwarf culture and especially dwarf women. Some are my original creations; others are confirmed-canon and speculative-canon that I really want to flesh out and develop as characters in their own right. I hope you will enjoy reading.

DUNININH- "The Female Guide"

2

He had no time to figure from this distance which one that actually was (as if it would be hard to miss). Already the cry had gone up that the king had come at last, and the dwarves were roused immediately.

Emli wife of Gloin was the first to offer her bent knee to the king, along with her son, Gimli. The lad was growing up so fast, fiery of hair and with the quick though not ignoble temperament of his father. He had begged and lamented like a petulant child to go on the quest. And Gloin had held a firm no, in spite of the grief it gave him to leave them in Ered Luin.

_Gloin was the lucky one._ Emli beamed with pride as Thorin praised Gimli's fine beard and ax, what a fine young dwarf he was growing into, on the cusp of manhood. Alas he was still a boy, in so many ways, exactly the way Thorin had remembered him. _Gloin was the lucky one, the luckiest one of all._

He blinked back the stinging of tears and embraced the boy tight, while Emli looked on in silent understanding, with fine, wistful lines drawn about her face, remembering.

_She could still see theirs, with hair ratted making mischief with little Gimli, carrying him about as if he were a toy, and how she scolded them for their muddy feet and ruined clothes even though they were the nephews of the exiled king, as they trod in her door. The smell of mud and rain on them, and little Gimli sopping, snarl-headed, laughing. She could still see their faces, one fair and confident always, the other sweet and smiling and swarthy. She could still see their faces…_

And Dori and Nori and Ori followed, reverently, and Ori seemed frightened to approach him but was nudged forth by Dori. Bofur and Bifur all but leaped at him, crushing him in an embrace though too overwhelmed to look into his eyes, as if he were a ghost. It was what Bifur muttered in Khuzdul again and again until Thorin put his hand over his to see that he was flesh and bone. And Bifur had embraced him once more, as tight as a child greeting a loved one after a long absence.

Thorin remembered that feeling, though by smaller arms_. If only, if only. To feel it one more time, another minute, even another second._He banished the thought from his head, a long-practiced banishment. His people were before him, ever-forgiving. If he could not do so for himself, theirs was good enough for the time.

When it seemed all had greeted and pledged their fealty to the king, Dwalin asked his leave and took a handful to gather firewood and water the ponies. Thorin looked everywhere for the woman who led them, and could find her nowhere. In the distance, he heard the sound of howling dogs and then a pony at a trot. From the road ahead of them came a bare-faced dwarf woman on the back of a shaggy black pony. By her side was another female dwarf, hearty-looking and pale-haired, donning a coat of mail. A trio of hounds begged the attention of the smaller, beardless one as several dwarves huddled around her for some news or another. She scratched the hounds behind their ears. "No orc tracks that can be found, none of their scent on the air or the ground."

The dwarves looked palpably relieved at the news, and of the directive to make camp there for the night. "Rest up well. We make for Bree in the morning," the woman said officiously. Sundown was coming; the dwarves were tired. Dwalin returned with Donbur, son of Bombur, who, like his father, was both colored and shaped like an orange. Donbur huffed and puffed, hauling armloads of firewood; he dropped his load near Thorin's feet, catching his breath. "Atta boy," Dwalin rumbled, slapping at Donbur's well-padded back. The beardless woman caught Donbur in her view like a bird of prey. "Best ye get a fire going and some stew in the pot," Dwalin laughed. "Before _she_ gives you another dressing-down."

Now _she_ was standing before Thorin, and looking up at him with eyes that were a harsh metallic shade somewhere between hazel and topaz. If Thorin and Dwalin were considered tall among dwarves, then this woman was positively minuscule by the same considerations. She was small and plump and stood no higher than Thorin's chest. Her size was momentarily irrelevant; her eyes, heavy and weary as they were, cut deep. Donbur straightened up under their examining gaze.

"So it is true," the woman said, eyes melting to a kinder expression toward the king under the mountain. "You have my fealty, Thorin son of Thrain. You are welcome to what is ours," and she curtsied stiffly before him, a reverent and stoic way about her.

"My lady," Thorin responded quietly. He gave the dwarrowdam a cautious glance, a quick study. Beardless, the enigmas in her face were utterly bared, her age uncertain, being neither elder nor particularly youthful; a harshness to life had aged her, whatever her years. Creases flanked her eyes, her orange hair in two long plaits that fell past her hips and were cinched in heavy sterling silver clasps.

"My king." She was called for by the women, bobbed a quick bow of her head to Thorin and went about her business.

"Who is that woman?" Thorin inquired of Dwalin.

"Ah, Meisar the Shepherdess. She's a tough stone to carve." He squinted his eyes after the orange-haired woman and together they watched the caravan begin settling down, except for the Meisar the Shepherdess, ringing the camp with her hounds to set out a perimeter for the night-watch.

Balin interrupted soon enough. "May we speak of… somewhat complicated matters? Walk with me, my king."

They walked away from the campsite together, into the night with only a small lantern between them. Balin finished a long train of thought and began to speak. "There is an odd crisis afoot in Erebor."

"I meant to inquire. I didn't know quite where to begin," Thorin muttered, darkly.

Balin pressed on. "A great council of the Seven Dwarf Families was called seven months past, but of pithy result. By law, the throne passes to Dain's son, Thorin Stonehelm, but he is a boy, not even old enough to wield an ax. And he has the Iron Hills to contend with. Or should I say, his mother does. Dain's widow rules in his stead, though her small council are a useless, bickering lot. The Hills are in chaos, and Stonehelm will not come to the Lonely Mountain to accept the crown or otherwise. I do believe the dwarves of the Iron Hills believe it cursed."

"Indeed." He remembered that strange twitch in Dain's eye, at the summit of the seven families in Ered Luin, those years past, pleading their alliance in the quest. It was not guilt hiding in his obstinacy, but fear. The dwarves of the Iron Hills understood something he had just begun to.

"The throne is empty, Thorin, but it is not the throne that dwarves- or men- desire. Best you know that Erebor thrives and grows stronger each day, but it is so for the regiments that guard it day and night. Gloin has overseen the running of the treasury. It keeps the sentries paid and at their watch. A small council rules in your stead, until your return. They will serve you well. I should know best. I am head of it."

"Until I return…" Thorin sighed, into the wind so Balin couldn't hear.

"As for the other matter of throne, the people call for Dis as their queen though no dwarf woman has ever sat on the throne of Erebor as regent. But she is…" "You have given her my apologies, surely?" Thorin inquired with a flit of self-loathing showing at his brow. He had not meant to hurt her, his beloved sister whose grief was already beyond measure.

"Aye, she forgives you with all of her heart- or what is left of it." Balin's eyes were filled with worry, in the grandfatherly way he had cared for them even as children. "I fear for her, my lord. She does not wish to rule… nor is she capable of it. She has isolated herself in the mountain halls. She can hardly bring herself to eat or sleep. Dis mourns as a mother would, but far more gravely than ever I have seen," Balin lamented.

"To breathe life back into them I would give my own. I did not keep my promise, Balin."

He watched the movement of Thorin's throat, the tightening of the skin over the laryngeal swell, the twitch of his jaw. He pinched his breath off and the color drained from his face. He stopped and set down his lantern and braced Thorin firmly about the shoulders.

"There is no oath you could have sworn, not even upon the honor of your forebears or the lives of your kin, that could have prevented what happened."

"I am not placated by that answer, but I accept it."

"It ended not in fire but in blood. That blood is not on your hands. Not theirs, not mine."

"You seem very sure of that." Balin's eyes shifted down a bit. "You are alive, and you are a king. That is all that matters now."

When they returned the campsite had already been laid down, and perimeters set with two armed watchers at each corner. Meisar the shepherdess ate while walking, an eye set to every dwarf and every pack animal and pony. Her eyes caught Thorin's at a distance, nodded with brief reverence, and quickly looked away.

There was only a small fire over which to eat, now that it was near dark. Four dwarves, Bofur, Nori, Dori and the iron-smith, Freyda, had been sent out on the first leg of watch. It left the remaining dwarves, not sent on watch or already bedded down, to gather around the fire and eat and commiserate before bed. Urdlaug, daughter of Bombur, cooked and served a hearty stew with conies and scallions. She had her father's skill at the cooking pot, if lacking his jovial personality. She carried a wooden tray as wide as she, laden with bowls, and offered the king his first, the biggest and the hottest bowl. It reminded him of days gone past, more troubled days of exile and uncertainty and hunger aplenty indeed. Alas, how there was always relief and simple pleasure at a dwarven hearth, where one could expect to find a hot supper, even in lean times. How they took care of each other even in the darkest hours. How Dwalin, seated beside him, yielding him a better heel of bread in exchange for his own, had done the same as they traveled, hammers in hand, from Rohan to Dunland to the Blue Mountains. He put his hand on the hot, crusty heel of bread and bid Dwalin keep it. And he thought of his home there in the West, which had grown over time to a comfortable lodging, as fit for a king in exile as it could be. His halls there had been modest in comparison to the splendor of Erebor but well-maintained.

"Who keeps my halls in the Blue Mountains now?"

The dwarves looked up when he spoke. The king had been near-silent all of the day, except in his salutations.

"The Broadbeams keep them well and fine," Emli assured him. "The dwarves that decided to stay in Ered Luin have done well. They look after each other." She finished combing Gimli's hair and pursed her lips. "Some could not bring themselves to come home."

"'_Amad_?" Emli's hands had stopped moving with the comb halfway through Gimli's hair.

She plucked a snarl out of his undone braid as he grimaced. "You were born in exile, my sweet son. You will know Erebor only its glory. But there are those who saw terrible things there, and they can never bring themselves to go back."

Seated close to where the fire's light dimmed and started to blend into night, Meisar the shepherdess looked up from her carving, and studied Thorin's melancholy face. Wisps of steam rising from the stew bowl between her knees concealed her side-eyed look toward Thorin, but only for a moment. She knew. He met her eyes for a brief moment and knew that she did.

The dwarves on the road called her Meisar the Beardless, though never to her face.

They said she was a guide-for-hire, a dwarrowdam who dwelt in the wilderness away from their kin, and had none that any of the dwarves could name. When Meisar the Shepherdess gave an order the dwarves on the road listened. She had a harsh voice for such a tiny woman, a voice that shook stone and moved bodies when she raised it. It was a peculiar profession for a dwarf, even more so for a dwarf woman. And she was peculiar. In Ered Luin she was a solitary woman, with a particular, deep solemnity written upon her beardless face. She had lived among the dwarves of Ered Luin since they had settled there, though none were certain where her origins lay. Bombur had taken her into his home some years past as a fosterling, but she did not stay, neither at Bombur's hearth nor in Ered Luin. Nori claimed her to be the offspring of a dwarf and a human whore, but Nori did not like having his fingers struck by a sheathed sword for stealing dried meats either, and thieves, Thorin knew too well, were cunning if fanciful liars too.

Nori, as his nature would have it, had slipped away from watch again, and Meisar was circling the perimeter with her dogs and a wind-licked torchlight. Calling his name into the night, gravelly with displeasure. A thief and a deserter, pursued with righteous indignation. Little wonder such sordid things had come from his tongue, mused Thorin, eyes fixed at the roving torchlight and the pattering of the dogs' feet on the hard earth. She returned to the campsite guided by the light of a fire that was kindling away from the main circle of the dwarves. Most had already put down their blankets and bedrolls in the center of the tight corral made by the wagons, and fell asleep in heaps and lumps as dwarves would do. Only a few remained awake, the same ones as the past nights- Thorin and Dwalin, tonight a few others. Heated by the dying embers, the evening stew was going cold; Donbur and Balin came with bowls of it for Thorin and Dwalin, around their little fire. Meisar entered the ragged circle about the fire, silently, to rekindle her torch in their fire, and set out again into the darkness to take up Nori's watch. She gave Thorin a short curtsy and disappeared into the night, as quickly as she had come.

"We traveled this land well, as merchants, as diplomats, as refugees. What need is there for a guide?" inquired Thorin, blowing on a bowl of stew heated to steaming, over the fire.

Dwalin nodded his head, tacitly. He had not left Thorin's side since they met on the Brandywine Bridge.

"Half of these dwarves have never been further East than the Last Bridge. Why, their sense of direction is about as sound as your own, laddie," offered Balin. "I know my way home," Thorin retorted, defensively. He felt a sharp prickle, ghost-like, on the back of his shoulders.

"Even if some among us do not, it is best we stay together."

"Best they have our protection. The lasses. The lot of them. What have our people come to that they travel alone?" Dwalin added, suddenly in agreement with his brother.

"Not alone," said Bofur. Smoke rings wafted from his pipe, his shoulders rested back against the bosom of his sweetheart, Brynja. "Not anymore," the dwarrowdam corrected, brown eyes as sweet as a honey tart framed in firelight and glinting, courtship braids visible in the mass of her walnut colored hair.

Thorin put his hands toward the warmth of the flame that Meisar had kindled up again with her torch. "You are led by a woman."

"_Dunininh._ A female guide, the Lady Meisar," said Brynja.

"The Beardless," snorted Dwalin. "Well, what of her, besides that?" Thorin asked gruffly.

"Honorable, I think, in character and in capability. Some uncommon traits for a dwarf, but a dwarf all the same, and our people look after each other. Always," mused Balin. There was a surety in his voice that comforted Thorin, momentarily.

"Sitting out by the rocks as we speak… watching for trolls, drinking alone…" Donbur shook his head, as he held his empty bowl to Bofur for refilling. "I've never met a soul lonelier than Meisar the Beardless."


	3. HERE BEFORE

Just as Balin had assured, they rose early and tarried on without delay.

Of the women on the road there was Eda the medicine woman, who traveled with a scurrilous cousin Siv over a century younger than she. Freyda was all muscle and metal, blonde brawn and broad shoulders. There was kindly Brynja, who had never expected Bofur to return from the quest for Erebor; he did, and now courted her properly, to the great happiness of them both. Hegi was a slightly unhinged dwarrowdam of uncertain age. She was said to have been a miner, a master craftswoman of improvised explosives. She spoke only Khuzdul and Bifur had already befriended her. There was Emli, the proud and overbearing mother of Gimli, who had always been a most enviable dwarrowdam among their people, for her lovely beard and stoutness of heart. Gyda was an orphan slightly older than Gimli, gawky for a dwarf but pretty enough as far as dwarves went. Urdlaug, stodgy eldest daughter of Bombur, wielded a frying pan with more gusto than a seasoned warrior could hold a sword. Donbur and four more sisters traveled with her- sturdy, tenacious Lulia, and Virta, apprentice to Eda in the healing arts. The youngest two of them, Anbur and Yrsa, were only small girls. Yrsa had survived a terrible accident as a toddling dwarfling and had a spoon for a hand (which Bombur of course had fashioned for her). And then there was Meisar.

There was no explaining Meisar. He had watched her for days with some degree of curiosity. She carried a sword too big for her, a set of dirks, and an engraved axe, roughly the size of the one lodged in Bifur's head, and sharp enough to severe a man's hand in one stroke. She donned a leather jerkin over a long tunic and brown skirt, worn with woolen breeches and short pointed boots trimmed in ragged furs. For travel and colder nights there was a gray-wolf mantle fastened with a torque of brass or burnished gold, and a cumbersome wool cloak, though the latter was rarely donned except in rain.

She gave Thorin a strange sense of security in the way she moved, though it was an unassuming way, no great dignity in her manner. Sometimes she slunk about wordlessly, her eyes as serious as stone and ever watchful. She was… he could not quite say what she was, but he had not thought this way of anyone in quite some time.

She had watched him with curiosity for days. The king under the mountain was tall for a dwarf, and possessed of an almost elegant melancholia. They told her he had been a blacksmith in exile, and the size of his forearms alone suggested this to be the truth. He was broad about the shoulders with long, thick black hair plaited at the temples, and his beard was black also and short for a dwarf's.

An odd instinctual knowledge within her precluded their formal introductions; she knew him immediately, and was not exactly sure how. It could have been the regal stoicism about his face, with burden set heavy upon his brow. Or his eyes, the blue of them of infinite depth, capable of drowning anyone who waded into them too quickly or too deeply.

He took her breath away for a moment. Nobody had ever done that before.

II

When he woke he couldn't breathe. He had been this dwarf before- after the dragon, after Azanulbizar, Thror and Frerin dead. Then into some terrible darkness Thrain had drifted off, and then disappeared altogether. And Eili, whose firstborn son was made in his image; Thorin had buried him himself, on the road, beneath a pile of scavenged rocks (_until we are stone again)_, with the ruffian's blade still buried in his ribs. And his sons… what were they but another set in a long line? He justified it. He had been here before. As his throat welled up and threatened to close off again he rattled off the names of all the dead in his mind, too many to count. He had survived before. He would again. _Just another in a long line._

He put his face to the cool summer earth, and he could feel it tremble with the thunderous rhythm of snores emitting from Donbur and his five sisters, sleeping nearby. He let the first hints of the twilight's dew seep into his pores, feeling suddenly too heavy to move, and as if he were asleep again…

Asleep or something like it. In the small hours he was never sure anymore, what was sleep and what was something else. Voices came out of the earth and then black hands, pulling him in. With that he woke again from the deadening moment of shuteye, and he felt hot, skin aflame mercurial and wicked, In nothing but the scant covering of his bedroll the heat from inside his body became unbearable. He rose and stepped quietly through the sleeping dwarves, all huddled together in the cozy corral of their wagons and animals. Dwalin woke quickly as a light wind from Thorin's stirring dinned at his beard and tickled his lips. He followed him to the edge of the camp, where they remained, huddled about a dying lantern. Their whispers went on, long into the dead of night, in the manner that women whispered secrets to each other in hushed tones.

Across the bedded cadre, Meisar shifted restlessly. She listened the voices of the dwarves who were still awake, just Thorin and Dwalin now. When the whispering stopped, the music began. Dwalin played a dirgeful fiddle on the edge of the camp, and Thorin sang. Thorin had an exquisite voice, but it was lugubrious, even deeper so when he was singing in his slow, melancholy lilt.

How sad he was.

III

At dusk the caravan rambled through the gates of Bree. There were Hobbits in the village, which made the dwarves a less noticeable interruption among the tall-folk. In Bree the tall-folk were a rough lot. The men wore neck-dirt and menacing glares, and the women were all crones dressed in rags, or tough-skinned young maids who worked the taverns and inns. Ramshackle wooden buildings all crowded together shadowed the main road through the village, which was full of ruts and refuse. The figures of men slunk through the shadows and in and out of the alleyways between the taverns and dissolute places where one could rent a room. They might have shaken down the dwarves or beaten them for sport, had it not been for the sheer number of them, and the fact that Dwalin kept Grasper and Keeper visible.

A dim amber light percolated out of the Prancing Pony as the dwarves neared. Of all the pickings in the village, it was the least onerous. The smell of smoke, from pipes and the fireplace, was heavy and omnipresent, but it masked the odors of unwashed bodies, moldy boots and alcohol- fresh from the mead barrel, regurgitated and strained through the kidneys alike. The clusters of tall-men parted as the convoy of dwarves made their way through into the tavern area. The dwarrowdams clustered together against the lewd invitations, and insults, spit by the men in various states of inebriation. Some were clearly more used to it than others. Meisar went forward to the innkeeper's vestibule. Men kept a watchful eye on her, while the other dwarves fought for space at the barkeep's counter. Thorin watched her, watched the men and did not let his eyes shift from theirs in defeat when they sucked rotten teeth at her and leered, and gave him taunting glares that challenged him to do anything about it. They called her little lady and wee lass, and offered her a free room and round of ale for barter, naming the sordid price aloud.

Dwalin followed the direction of Thorin's eyes, where they fell, on Meisar, who was bargaining for a little more meat, a little more bread, for her company's coin. Dwalin touching his arm made him flinch.

"Get something to eat," said Dwalin.

"I have been here before."

"Thorin?"

He let out a fastidious growl. "Rogues and thieves in every corner. Keep an eye on them, Dwalin. Nobody goes anywhere here alone."

"I followed you into the gates of fire with a willing heart, and I am by your side still."

Before the fire, they were sitting side by side. In the dim glow of it, Dwalin's eyes were narrow with presentiment. Thorin surveyed the ruckus of the tavern. He shot a straight look into Dwalin's eyes. "This night you look out for the women of this company. I can handle myself."

His shoulders slacked a bit as a rangy barmaid set plates of boiled chicken and whole potatoes before them. "As I remember, the food was decent," Thorin muttered, plucking a hunk of meat away.

The dwarves had gathered around in several long tables and pushed them nearer the fire and their king and his ever-loyal Dwalin. Bombur's brood were elbow-deep in mashed potatoes, chicken and a plate of cheeses and hot bread. Yrsa drizzled gravy over their trenchers with her spoon-hand. Eda was yanking Siv back from engaging the leering drunks with a show of her bosom followed by a mouthful of dwarven curses. Dori turned Ori away from the sight and into a tankard as wide as his face and as full as it would be all night. There was no sign of Meisar but he could hear her voice; he caught a visage of her in the mirror above the fireplace. Still haggling with the innkeeper and another crusty fellow who had come out of the kitchen to have a look at the dwarven company. Thorin watched their eyes, their hands. Rubbing them together grotesquely, the kitchen boy and the innkeeper who must have been his father their misshapen foreheads looked so much alike.

"There is no need. I will pay in coin," he heard her insist firmly.

The innkeeper took her coin and jeered sullenly.

"Dwarf-slut," added the yellow-toothed barkeep. Thorin caught his eye and put his hand to the hilt of his sword, quiet as a snake in the grass though just as deadly if his expression was anything to judge by. The barkeep sneered at him. "Must be yours."

Meisar's cheeks flamed pink but her expression was unchanged. Several dwarves had already risen beside Thorin angrily. Two hobbits dove under the corner table and covered their heads. "Let it go, or we'll be sleeping in mud tonight," Meisar hissed efficiently at the sprung dwarves.

"You little ladies bearded all over?" Another drunkard stole a longer glance at Meisar, her stern little face entirely without reaction to the bawdy japes of the Bree-Men. The drunkest one already on the floor tugged the hem of her tunic and she stepped hard on his fingers without looking at him. But when it was Emli's skirts they tugged at, Gimli was on his feet, ax raised. "Keep your filthy drunken hands off my mother!" Gimli surged toward the inebriated molester, ready for a fight, when the female innkeeper, a square-faced, pox-riddled old alewife, stormed in and flung a meaty three-fingered hand upside the jaw of the barkeep and then her husband. "Keep yer hands off the women! What'dya want with dwarves anyway? Women harrier than men!"

The drunk made a boorish kissing sound toward Emli. "Daah… I'll close my eyes and pretend you're a female."

"_Umzûm!" _blustered Emli. "Brutes." Gimli stepped to shield his mother and butted at the drunk with his ax. "Speak to her again and I'll split you right!"

Meisar stepped quietly between Gimli and the drunk, made her case to the innkeeper's wife. "Pray let us rest here in peace for the night, madam. There shall be no trouble." She nudged Gimli back toward his ale and the hot plate of potatoes.

"Well then, little lady-dwarf…" The innkeeper put her hands on her hips and looked down at Meisar, twice her height easily. "Tell me, how can I trust you to keep your word? Are you going to lasso all these pint-sized ruffians up yourself, they make trouble?"

Thorin seethed at the exchange, the smug tilt of the woman's head down at her, though Meisar never lifted her head, not even to meet her eyes. She was steady, but her hand was shaking on the hilt of her dirk.

"On our honor as dwarves," Thorin declared stoutly, stepping before her. The alewife looked him up and down with pig-like eyes. "I've seen you here before. With that craggy old wizard. A wizard and a runt. None but trouble."

Thorin stood open-mouthed and said nothing.

"You speak to Thorin Oakenshield, son of Thrain son of Thror, King Under the Mountain," Dwalin related indignantly.

The alewife regarded him tiredly. "Thought you were dead."

Dwalin grunted again. "Lucky your dirty stinking hole of a piss-pot inn-"

"These men put lewd hands on our women-folk. We would not have taken up otherwise. Of course, if it pleases you, we will seek our shelter elsewhere." She picked up the fat bag of coins from the table, jingled it in her hand. Gold.

Thorin flinched.

The alewife's eyes grew wide and greedy, and she smiled, clapping her mangled hands. "My regrets majesty." She curtsied stupidly on her fat, lumbering frame to Thorin, then hollered into the kitchen. "More meat for our guests! And potatoes with the good gravy!"

A strapping, curly-headed barmaid came out, arms full of loaded plates, and laid a decent table of food before the huddled dwarves. Ale followed, and more after that. Meisar put the bag of coin into her jerkin with the other bags of coin, and had downed a whole potato skin and all before Thorin could finish his train of thought. "You are paid well for this guiding business?" he half-asked, half-observed, wrinkling his brow.

"Everything has a price, my king."

IV

They ate until the kitchen was bare and the ale barrels empty. When it was late into the night, the resident drunkards had passed out and the dwarves were drifting upstairs.

"Shepherdess?" Thorin half-muttered in Meisar's direction. She waved a chubby hand at the ribbon of smoke. "Yes milord?"

"What do you do there?" He took a seat in the chair opposite hers before the fire. He looked at the frayed map spread out across her lap, dim in the firelight.

"Mapping out tomorrow's travels. Dwarves may like to do things at their own pace, but I would like to clear the Misty Mountains before winter." She bent her head back to her map, her eyes strained at it, marking it with the burnt end of a stick.

"_Mahal _bring us there before then," Thorin commented, lowly. "Aye," agreed Meisar. "If all is well, we will arrive while the Long Lake is water, but not long before it is ice."

She looked up and realized they were alone together.

He looked back toward Meisar and she averted her eyes from his. It was an odd feeling that formed in him seeing the hint of her blush, building and then weighing in his chest.

She said nothing. Out of the corner of her eye she could see Dwalin on the landing of the staircase, unmoving, watching them both. She squeezed the stick in her hand and twisted it against her palm. What could she say to a king? What could she say to Thorin Oakenshield, a king whose grief had driven him into exile with the most peculiar of Arda's peoples, and let his own believe him dead? She willed herself she would never inquire. No, they were waters too deep to wade into.

But while he looked away, she found herself searching his face in the dim light of the fire for any sign of vulnerability, any crack in the façade, weary as it was already. She knew too well the dangers of finding any.

Alas, in spite of whatever forces had pulled her into his orbit, she stopped herself from thinking further, how pathetic her curiosity was, already nagging her.

"And what is a dwarf woman doing alone in the wilderness, may I ask?"

"I know these lands. Better than I know some of these dwarves. They've spent so many years in Ered Luin they've all but forgotten the way home…"

"Home," he repeated flatly.

She paused, awkwardly, cleared her throat against the smoke. "I have myself a very important duty now, with a king in our company. I am at your service, my liege, for whatever it is I may do for you. In my capacity."

"You didn't answer my question," Thorin said back to her.

He kept his eyes firmly on her, the fidgety motions her head and hands made. "I suppose I don't have an answer for that."

V

A great room with small partitions had been provided for them. It had a fireplace, and a copper tub, for the dwarves who wanted to bathe or wash their clothes. They strung up drying laundry around the tub for privacy.

Thorin sat by the door long after the rest of the company retired, falling heavily into the beds. Beds fit for two humans each fit four dwarves comfortably, each and all nesting together, males and females alike, full and warm. Dwalin had finally given over to sleep and was out like a lamp beside his brother. Every voice in the hall, every creak of the floor outside the room, made him flinch.

Meisar lay at the foot of the bed, with her hounds sleeping close to her, warming Bofur and Brynja's feet. She raised her head up toward Thorin, sitting awake by the door, a great Elven sword across his lap. "You should sleep," she murmured.

Thorin barely acknowledged her. She surveyed Dwalin's sleeping form in the dark, before she slid off the high bed. The bald, tattooed dwarf had made her un-eased the way he had looked at her from the stairwell. "Sleep," she said firmly to Thorin, and he seemed a bit more pliant, with the heaviness of his eyes now visible. "You may have my place. I will keep watch."

Reluctantly, he crawled into the empty space. He nestled into the warmth she left, the smell of sweet-grass and pipe smoke where her head had rested, and it was like the tea Bilbo Baggins had given him to make him sleep- heady, an inexplicable comfort that possessed both body and mind at once.

But he couldn't sleep, not for some time. Her form, perched beside her hounds in a rocking chair she had dragged to the door, should have put him at ease but it did the opposite. She was so small, and tall-folk, when they were emboldened on drink, were strong, and merciless.

When he did sleep, for a precious moment, there was a brief and terrible darkness that woke him almost as soon as he had drifted off, or so it seemed. When he woke again it was morning. Dwalin had shoved Brynja and Bofur up to the head side of the bed and was snoring beside Thorin, and Meisar had sunk out of the chair by the door and lay on the carpet in front of it with her head rested on the flank of one of her hounds.

If she was neither charismatic nor particularly familiar, her dogs seemed to have affection for her. Thorin blinked at her, feeling less tense. He craned his neck to squint toward the window, at the threads of dawn-light coming through. There was a slowness to the morning that was of vague comfort. The smell of cinnamon and breakfast cakes wafted upstairs from the kitchen, which was loud and clattering through the thin walls and ceilings. In the hall there were sounds of the chambermaids fending off attentions from the guests who'd drank too much the night before. Only Bofur and Brynja had woken, besides Thorin, who had buried his head into a cool pillow. They cooed and embraced beneath the bedclothes, until Dwalin silenced their goings-on with a heel in Bofur's tailbone. Had he been keener, he might have seen Freyda the iron-smith giving him an enchanted study as he got up out of bed and exchanged his sleep shirt for the laundered tunic hanging over the washtub. Robust and with a fine fair flaxen beard to complement her tresses, the dwarrowdam was rather pretty.

He might have seen other things had he not occupied himself lacing himself back into his heavy fur-lined boots, after tunic, mail coat, sword-belt and ax-holders had been strapped on again along with his fur mantle and knuckle dusters. Thorin was no longer asleep. His head rested sideways on the pillow, which he held under his arms. "You didn't have to sleep so roughly, _dunininh," _he half-yawned at Meisar. He was awake now and pushing back a hank of dark sleep-mussed hair from his face. "My king?"

Thorin smoothed out the goose-down comforter as he rose. "There was room for one more."

The woman's lower lip made a twitching motion. "I pray _Mahal_ you slept well my king."

He looked melancholy again, to her dismay. "Pray indeed."


	4. ZESULÂL

**A/N: **Much appreciation to any new followers and thank you for bearing with my drawn-out storytelling. I'm a sucker for little details. I promise next chapter will pick up the pace quite a bit.

Zesulal- One Who Is Alone/Loner

I

The dwarves were filled on ale and heavy food from Bree. When they left half were bumping along full-bellied and nearly the other half woozy from too much ale. Meisar was unhappy and forbade any more drunkenness now that they were deep into the Lone Lands along the Great East Road, where there had been reports of orc attacks and armed thieves. Bofur and Bifur had spent the last of their coin on several barrels of Bree blonde, and with Nori's help, acquired another free of charge. They listened not to Meisar after a few ales, and the harsh sound of her voice melted against the snap of cold ale.

With drink night watches were blown off, so much to Meisar's chagrin that she took it up herself.

She took an angrily stroll across the camp to make her displeasure known. She had a heavy stride for such a tiny woman. For a moment, Thorin mused, she reminded him of himself in the days of exile, heavy-footed and heavier-hearted, but never cowed by despair, at least not where anyone could see.

"What in Durin's name is Meisar up to now?" Dori whined. "If she keeps up with this night-watch business all of us are going to wind up sleepless and miserable." Thorin had felt a consternation rise in this throat then.

He remembered Fili and Kili and the ponies.

"Leave her be," Nori huffed. "Stubborn wretch." He rubbed his smarting fingers from where she had struck him the day before, pilfering goat jerky from Urdlaug's wagon. Thorin ignored him purposely, fetching up the last of the ale. He stood and brushed the ash off his clothing. "Where are you going?" the 'Ri brothers demanded in unison.

He did not answer. The darkness swallowed him up, and they returned to their stew. "Do you think?" Ori put out, wiggling his brows. Dwalin shot him down quickly. "Not a chance, laddie."

Dwalin looked after Thorin in the dark with a keen eye. "Not a chance…"

II

"I thought you were Master Nori, finally turning up for duty," Meisar growled. Her voice was irritated. "Nori is a cunning fighter, though he can be rather impervious to taking orders," Thorin protested, stifling the urge to defend him further.

"And a petty thief," Meisar grumbled. "He despises me because I caught him stealing smoked meat and nearly broke his fingers. For that I am not sorry."

"I imagine Master Nori is though," Thorin observed flatly. He sat on the rock next to Meisar, at a comfortable distance.

"I despise thieves, regardless of their war-stories," Meisar asserted stoutly. There was a moment of awkward silence between them. "What are you doing out here, my king?" Meisar's eyes narrowed at him shyly.

"Night-watch is always two at each post. You shouldn't be out here alone."

"I can manage myself." Thorin took a gulp of ale, handed the tankard to her. She nodded politely. "Though I am grateful for your offer."

"I will stay regardless," he insisted, not quite brusquely but forcefully enough so that Meisar raised no other objection. "You prefer to be out here alone? Will you alone keep us safe from harm or is it stubborn pride, woman?" Thorin harrumphed.

"You're one to speak of stubborn pride, my liege." She smiled, hints of irony in her voice forming little commas at the corners of her mouth.

Her shyness seemed to lift only for a precious minute, and she stiffened in her body language and countenance quickly again. "I will not have my people slain as they sleep. The lone-lands are crawling with beasts," Meisar stated tersely. Her eyes were locked into his deadly serious. Thorin grumbled resignedly to himself. He thought the ale would soften her mood.

"Your people? It seems you have spent most of your time away from us. Was that by choice?" Thorin quipped. Meisar was not amused. "Good-night, my king." She pushed her blades angrily into their scabbards and rose to depart.

"It matters not to me," Thorin muttered. "Would you stay?" He gestured for her to sit, which she did, reluctantly. "You stay because you enjoy my company so?" Meisar grumbled sarcastically.

"I stay because am a king. It is my duty to protect my flock just as it is yours. I find your commitment honorable, for what it is worth." Meisar shrugged agreeably, the rigidity in her shoulders easing for the moment.

"Thank you," she responded quietly. He was not one for heaping praise on random folk, and this she seemed to surmise, having heard the king under the mountain was a noble man but a brooding one also, who displayed neither humor nor light-heartedness in any great abundance. She pondered him curiously, looking up at him when she went to refill her ale.

He took her in carefully. She was plain-faced, even by dwarven considerations. Meisar had many lines about her eyes, the wear and tear of exile worn plainly. She had a roundish face with a stubborn chin, ruddy about the cheeks with windburn. When they were not capable of slicing throats with a glance, her eyes had a hooded look about them, heavy-lidded and mournful. She had a small scar at the bridge of her nose, which was stubborn and proud like her chin and lightly freckled. But there was something redeeming in that face, from the heart-shaped mouth that was small and set, ears that were unmistakably dwarvish and hung modestly with burnished copper rings. And her hair was a lovely, shocking autumnal shade. He saw something that he did when his own reflection was looking back at him, and that frightened him about her. It was the eyes. Always the eyes. Such pools of quiet radiance bore a terrible weight. Thorin tried not to study her so intently.

"It is a long night on watch, if you wish still to stay. I would… welcome it."

He gave the smallest of a smile in response. She had heard the king was rather burdened in his countenance, and smiled rarely.

"Aye, and it will be long day again tomorrow."

"This journey has only begun," Meisar muttered.

"Yes, indeed it has."

III

By the morning there was hope in the endless expanse of blue sky stretching east. It was summer but it was not as hot as it had been in the previous weeks. The Lone-Lands were windswept; there had been little rain that summer.

The dwarrowdams had proven hardy company, and for their part, had made life on the road slightly more comfortable for Thorin and his comrades, who were used to traveling rough. Urdlaug and her sisters did all the cooking. Her wagon was kitted out as a mobile kitchen. A second wagon and two pack animals bore their belongings and provided them a place to sleep. The dwarrowdam Hegi had a wagon of her own though she travelled alone. It was covered in ax-marks and arrow holes, what looked like a few splatters of dried blood, and painted in loud runes that warned all to keep out of her things. Eda and Siv rolled along with their mobile apothecary, both on ponies; their wagon drawn by a pair of rotten-tempered Ibexes. Leading the wagons was Emli and Gimli's oblong wain, black-cherry wood with keen steel wheels meant to take the mountain passes. It was cluttered, almost impassibly with the trappings of their comfortable life in Ered Luin. Gimli spent most of his time seated at its reins, kept impressively groomed and dressed even on this long, roughish migration. He polished his mail each night while his mother supervised. The bellwether amongst the dwarrowdams, Emli rode her pony side-saddle, always in proper, womanly dresses, so that her legs would never be displayed to the men.

Some of the women attired themselves much like the men did in leathers and vests of mail. In exile, they dressed as men to fend off defilement, some of their own accord, others at the behest of their kin and Ones, who would have been driven murderous by such outrages. Now, in times of relative peace, they were wont to clad themselves simply, if heavily, for travel, in long tunics belted at the waist with cinchers of leather and metal and long, unobtrusive cambric skirts or thick breeches. They donned good furs though, jewelry subtle but still displayed proudly. Like the men they all wore heavy boots and kept weapons at their belts. Exile, alas, and enough of its trappings, were coming to an end for them, and it showed.

The women stuck together and they kvetched, from sunup to sundown, and their ponies had a tendency to clutter and skitter when they tried to get too many abreast on the road in the midst of conversation. Meisar, save Brynja who shared Bofur's pony, was the only female that rode with the men, in the front of the caravan, with Dwalin and Thorin both abreast. She never spoke, just kept her eyes trained on the road and all that surrounded it.

In contrast, the chatter of the women never seemed to cease. Women's talk had never much interested him, but now Thorin he strained at every word.

"Is he…?"

The answer was muddled by Dwalin trying to make small talk, in his way with long, animated stories peppered in baudy jokes. He tried. _Mahal _bless him, he tried. Thorin's languor frightened him, and bless his beard, he contained it. But he couldn't hide it. And neither could the rest of them.

"_Nekhush,_" Oin said, lamentably. So deaf he was now, it was unmistakable; he had no understanding of volume, and everything came out louder than it was supposed to. "It has lain his sister the princess low. I fear it has gripped him also."

"Quiet yourself. Put your ear trumpet in," admonished Eda.

"He is our king!" came an indignant, hoarse protest in a voice struggling to remain a whisper. "_Mahal_ has brought him to us, here, now. You mustn't speak of him like-"

"Hush," came Emli's voice, proud, ever-commanding. At least amongst the dwarrowdams, her word was often the last.

_Daruth, Nekhush._ He had learned that there were two terrible kinds of darkness that weighed upon the mind in this world, as the dwarves knew them. _Daruth_, the despair, was every dwarf's burden, dark times for people laid low, a collective misery that would color their stories and their songs. But _Nekhush_, the sorrow, came after _daruth_, when hope was lost altogether. He had seen it. For all the hunger and toil, the heat and the cold, the fevers and plagues that killed off men like flies that they survived, _nekhush_, was the most unbearable burden. At first, it wasn't an obvious thing but after years in the dregs it was, and slowly, over time, it showed its fatal tendencies. Sometimes they simply lay down in the shadows of rocks with their hammers in hand, and waited to die. And some had committed the worst crime against Aule's creation of all, and pounded on the doors of their Father's Halls long before their time, of their own accord, as their fortunes sunk too low to bear.

It had never crossed his mind. He was still too proud for that, and that gave him a small comfort. But it was not himself that he had long worried for.

"_Bundushar_," grunted Bifur, too loudly for anyone's comfort. _Head in smoke._ Dwalin glared a warning at him. But he suddenly realized that Thorin had been listening all along, and Dwalin had no words, for the first time in years.

_Nekhush. Dis. Sister._

_Zesulâl__. Beneath the mountain. A Princess of ash amid the splendor._

He stopped his pony and muttered a need to go off the road for a moment. Meisar halted and peered into the empty space between them that Dwalin had unblocked as he reeled back on his pony. She thought she caught a glimpse of something in his eyes, a glint of woe so deep it was capable of throwing him off his center. But if he sensed it too, he seemed to catch himself, and the melancholy pools became frozen over and staid once again.

He went off the road and she watched him go behind a jagged crop of rocks. Just beyond him, she squinted up at the round rise of stone and dirt that was Weathertop, an ancient sentinel that would have seemed past its use.

"There is the old watchtower of Amon Sul," she pointed toward it, growing shadowy against the late afternoon sun. "Perhaps it is wise to stop here after all."

Thorin knelt against a jag of stone just off the road. Nausea gripped him, a dark pit in his stomach and chest. One harsh breath after the other left him dizzy. He struggled to hold down the rabbit stew Urdlaug had made at midday. Gently he put his head to the warm stone and whispered into the empty air, where no one could hear, waiting for the wave to pass. It always did. Somehow, it always did.

"_Sister… forgive me. Sister-sons… my sister sons…"_

IV

"You must be joking," grumbled Dwalin.

"Look there, Mister Dwalin. The sky is clear. One can see to the foothills of the Misty Mountains, and everything in between," Meisar shot back.

Balin began to squirm nervously the longer Thorin was off the road and out of sight. "Brother," he nudged at Dwalin.

"…Cooling our heels for what? A bit o' exploring?" he queried, irritably. She turned her pony around so that it faced his. "Spend time in the wilds, you'll learn how to see to all ends." Her voice was low and defiant.

"Brother," repeated Balin, louder.

"…Best we move, until dark…"

"I must look ahead."

"Brother!" Balin was beginning to squirm back and forth on his pony, rubbing his hands over the reins until they were chafed. Thorin was nowhere in sight. He cleared his throat ready to make his next exhortation heard a league away.

"-What say you then, my king?" Dwalin asked suddenly. Balin turned around to find that Thorin had returned.

"Thorin?" His white-knuckled hands released themselves from the reins. Thorin caught the flushing color of his knuckles as they turned from white to red, the blood coming back into them.

"You should not go alone," said Thorin suddenly. He retrieved his ax from the saddlebag. "Very well," Dwalin grunted, dismounting. "Let us provide the lady an escort. To… tour, the old watchtower."

"Stay here," Thorin told him. "Keep them safe." An air of command had returned to his voice. It might have relieved Dwalin under another circumstance, but judging from the way his eyes squinted and he snuffed a growl of protest, it didn't seem to.

"Best we be quick about it, then, shepherdess," he muttered. She acquiesced, wordlessly.

Throwing Balin an urgent glimpse Dwalin silently begged some backing, for what he couldn't say. So Balin was silent and bemused. He shrugged his shoulders, helplessly.

If he had sensed ill, and sense ill Dwalin often did, even when there was none to be had, he _knew_ he would have been off his pony and on the tail of his king, and the woman, the beardless dwarf. But there was no clear sense of that foreboding, even if he wanted it to be there. A mistrust of all strangers, even their own, had hardened in him. He wanted to believe there was reason to latch to his king's side, but his legs would not make the motion to dismount and follow, as if his mind, in its better wisdom, would simply not allow it. He let them go.

V

"He watches your every move. And mine," Meisar remarked quietly as they trod up the steep stairs. The passageway upwards was dark, light filtering down from the head of its twisted, overgrown stair. They kept their weapons drawn. "My lady?"

"Mister Dwalin. He cares for you as a brother, as much as a king. It is plain to see."

"Yes. He does. And I for him."

"It is good, to have someone in this world, with whom you can trust your life." There was a deep and intrinsic, if stilting, kindness in her words, but there was sadness too. He could feel it, in his bones. Long had he learned the secret language of those who were alone in the world, and it troubled him.

"He has protected me all my life, though I let him believe, for many months, that he had failed to do so."

"I sense there were forces at work in that matter… beyond your control, my king. Praise _Mahal _that you are alive."

"I draw breath, my lady." He uttered no more. They made eye-contact with brief side-glances at each other. That uncanny spark of kindness, a flash of some kinship in woe, expressed itself, fleetingly in her eyes again, though she was silent. There was a cloudiness in his mind about her. She might have had the coloring of a flame, to him, still, she was more smoke than fire, and something in him wished desperately that it might clear a bit.

Alas, yet, he would have said all the things that were on his mind if he had the words to say them. She was, after all, a lone woman, a simple woman. She might understand his predicament, even his grief. She had never spoken of any family. They might be gone too, snatched away before their time. Dwarves were tribal creatures, their loyalties and bonds like iron. A lone dwarf always had a story, usually a terrible one.

When at last they reached the top she circled one way and he the other. They met at its eastern side. She had a primitive scope with her that she pointed over the Lone Lands to the East. Plumes of ashen grey smoke rose in the distance, over an open plain of land where she knew there to be several villages of men. "Smoke rises from the dwellings of men," she bit at her lip, concernedly. "Midsummer's Eve was only this past night. Perhaps it is bonfires," he suggested. It was true enough, but he did not like the look in her eyes. She went on.

"A caravan of some kind travels northeast, toward the Ettenmoors. I see the dust of some company on the air." "Of good or ill?" Thorin asked. He felt a tight knot form in his belly, between his ribs. The world had been a quiet, bucolic stream of days, far too long.

"I know not, but I am un-eased at the sight of it. We will make camp here."

"Very well then."

"Perhaps it is best that you tell Mister Dwalin yourself."

They made their way down the north side of the watchtower. "Look there," she pointed; he drew his sword. "'Tis a berry patch only my liege." His eyes were drawn suddenly to the patch's offerings. Blackberries, sunlight illuminating them a rich, dark, royal purple; she picked one off the brambly bush and savored it, a hint of a smile creased her lips, almost sweetly. Thorin followed cautiously after her. The ripeness of the fruits tickled his nose. He remembered the sun and the fields of The Shire, the smell of fresh dirt and root vegetables, the plumpest of berries, the sharp, earthy scent of pumpkins at the end of summer. Bilbo had been fond of berries, raspberries the best. Blackberries he disliked for their terrible thorny vines, as he despised all manner of discomfort. _Dear Friend_, he mused silently. _How I miss your gentle company._ After awhile Bilbo had begun to understand. He feared, listening to the hushed whispers of the dwarves, that his own would not, not for some time. They might know pain and grief, all the same things his eyes had seen, his nose had smelled- the sulfur of dragons' breath burning away their world, the sweat of the forges, ashes that turned acidic in his sinuses and mouth- but they would never know a king's burden. He would not have wished it on any of them, not an ounce to share, for their love and loyalty had endured all recklessness and bloodshed. But they feared for him. He knew it with painful clearness. And fear was a terrible poison.

He banished the ill thought from his mind. While she filled the jars in her pack, he sucked the juice from the ripe skins, let the sweet and sour play on his tongue. There would have to be some good in this world if he were to return to it. The warmth and sun of the Shire had brought him a peace he had not expected to find there, but he longed for the embrace of stone. To embrace his sister, to ask forgiveness of her, and of-

The berries suddenly tasted sour and flat in his mouth. Meisar at last rested on a rock amid the brambly berry-bushes, and offered Thorin her water skin. "I'll have Bombur's lasses can them and make preserves." She spoke with a slight accent, a bit rough, like many of the dwarves who came from Moria or from generations brought up in Ered Luin. Hers had a refined edge, soft consonants punctuated by pronunciations that had gone rough over the years. Much in the way that he caught himself saying "aye" the longer he and Dwalin travelled together. A surge of something deeply unfamiliar panged at him. Meisar's heavy, downcast eyes, focused on her task as she was, did not seem to notice.

"Where do you come from, Meisar?"

"Does it matter?"

"You lead this company. I would like to know something about you other than foul anecdotes from a thief you struck."

"Master Nori I take it," she smiled with uncharacteristic sarcasm. "Who I hear has called my father a lecherous dwarf and my mother a lecherous human, who was paid for her lechery."

"So what is it?"

"My mother was a daughter of the East, of Dale, fully a dwarf if you must know." Meisar's eyes caught his sharply. "As was my father, so far as I know."

"I implied nothing," Thorin retorted, defensively.

Meisar exhaled, tiredly. She went on filling her containers to the brim, unbothered by the thick brambles. "Is it my lack of beard that strikes your curiosity?"

"For a dwarven woman, perhaps so."

"For your honesty I will oblige you. I was born in Dale is as much as I know. As for my lack of beard, I have heard it said by a dwarf who sheltered me for a spell that my follicles were singed. I came out of the inferno with no eyebrows or hair." He dared himself to study her face again; her eyebrows were wispy, against a prominent brow. Had it not been for their red-orange hue, like her hair, they might have been ephemeral altogether. The hair though, was quite thick, and very long, in its twin plaits. What luck for a dwarf, he thought, sadly. He searched her face for any sign that it had once been bearded. Suddenly all he could see was fire.

"Dale, you said?" he repeated, stilting.

"Yes, my king."

"And the inferno…"

Her face darkened along with his. "I was little more than a toddling babe when it came, the dragon and then the bedlam. We could not stay."


	5. REPLENISH

"You would find it strange to believe, but he is not incapable of managing himself," Balin told Dwalin, halfway to irritated with his brother. "You cannot second guess every step he takes."

"Gone a year in the Shire with the Halfling. And now running off with another one."

"The lady is not a hobbit." Dwalin pouted, disenchanted. "Could have had me fooled."

"I fear for him. Of course I fear for him. But at this moment I do not. And I welcome those moments." Balin crossed his arms stiffly over his chest.

"I woke up last night when he bedded down. It was in the wee hours. What do you suppose he wanted with her all that time? Or her with him?" Dwalin mused suspiciously.

"I have no idea, brother. None at all."

II

They walked silently back around the base of the watchtower and did not speak. In her mind there was nothing to say, only ponder, imagine, left to wonder whether there was mirth in him, as there was gentleness. There was kindness. She had seen plainly the better nature of his heart already, in the way he cared for his people and looked after each of them on the road as carefully as she.

But as they came down and Dwalin grumbled over making camp, Thorin drifted away, and barely acknowledged her for the rest of the afternoon and into the night. He and Dwalin had their little fire again after the other dwarves were long asleep, and Balin joined, but there was no music that night.

Morning brought better prospects. Meisar had gone to Amon Sul again, at daybreak, while the dwarves still slept, and found that the smoke had cleared over the village, and no ominous packs made dust anywhere from there to the horizon.

The caravan moved again, after they had broken their fast on thick-cut bacon and blueberry cakes served from Urdlaug's wagon. The sky was placid and endless. On the air was a dry scent of grass and parched earth. The wind was an easterly wind, worrying Meisar for it brought no smoke signals or the scent of orc from the west for the dogs to detect. Nonetheless, the company seemed in good spirits. It would have to hold them, for now.

They met a stream a few leagues ahead, and they decided to stop and bathe there.

The sound of splashing and peals of laughter caught in the hazy afternoon, while the animals sunned onshore. The men went to one side of a thicket of tree-branches dipping into the water. Their clothes were tossed off in haphazard piles and they thundered in, slapping naked backs, pelting each other with their soaps, and splashing mightily.

More daintily than otherwise, the dwarrowdams sorted their supply of soaps, towels and hair-combs. Layer after layer they shed, until sunlight met skin at last, and underneath it all they were mostly the same- sweaty and sore.

Clothes and hair-beads were shed and deposited in hollows between the rocks. Meisar's over-tunic, her jerkin and long skirt and the braies she wore beneath were shucked off with uncanny relief, against the summer heat. She stored her garments close to the shore, stepping naked into the cool stream. She could feel the eyes of the dwarrowdams on her, checking her up and down, and they found she was little and hairy in all the places they were, except for her face.

She sunk into the stream neck deep and dipped her head back in the water. When she surfaced, Emli shot a sliver of soap her way. "It has a minty scent. But don't eat it. It tastes terrible, not at all like mint."

Thorin was the last into the water keeping a cool watch over the company. He washed intently, enveloped in the relieving chill of the water. Bofur tossed soap at him. He scrubbed at his chest and his back and lathered the hair at his underarms, scouring the earthy odour from himself. He washed his long hair in the cool water, massaging his scalp and keeping the tangles at bay as best he could with his fingers. The water relaxed his muscles, so much as they could be.

A large rock planted in the center of the stream further shielded the men and women from each other's sight, though much ribaldry went on between them. It was a sign of their unbroken spirits, however small. With the afternoon sun glinting down in approval, many a giggling dwarrowdam ribbed at the men, who were climbing in various states of undress onto the rock to tease back at them. Urdlaug shielded her sisters' eyes and brayed orders at them to go about their business. Meanwhile, Nori and Ori laid low in the rocks, about to commandeer a raid. While the dwarrowdams tried to move the men from the rock by pelting them with mud-balls and stones, the two went stealthily into the rocks and collected up the women's clothing. All the while Dori stayed behind and huffled and puffled about the impropriety of it all, keeping himself well-concealed up to his shoulders in the stream, until Dwalin came along and dunked him. It was one of the lighter moments the company had experienced since Ered Luin.

They had made off with an armful of garments each before Meisar emerged, wrapped a rough-spun towel, and trotted uselessly to chase them off. "Boys, stay to your side!" Her voice rumbled like a rather stern warning but when she turned around Thorin could see was smiling. She had good teeth, small teeth like pearls, and for a moment, he thought she might have laughed.

"Let us show them the meaning of foul play," Freyda challenged, and went up onto the shore to dress. Dwalin caught a glimpse of her strong, round buttocks and legs like tree trunks and dipped back into the water to hide the distraction at his loins.

Ori and Nori, and now Bofur barreled around the corner and littered the surface of the water with female clothing. Before any could rescue their garments all were in the stream and the men were on the shore laughing as the little hairy women dove and waded about the sopping flotilla of clothes.

As the afternoon went on, seemingly endless, the women trod about in the long tunics and under-coats yielded to them by the men, shaking out and beating upon wet clothes as if to brutalize them into drying. Meisar was cool and wet and sat alone. Loose strands of sopping red hair clung to her cheeks while she struggled to re-braid it properly. She looked over at Thorin, fully dressed again. She studied his layers, behind a curtain of half-undone hair. His outer coat and the sleeveless patterned surcoat he wore beneath, followed by the inner doublet, a layer of mail, and finally his knee-length tunic, belted at the waist in a handsome silver and mithril belt. He wore heavy boots with the worn doeskin breeches tucked inside them.

"Aren't you a bit warm?" Bofur called out. He was garbed in only his breeches, bracers and the long-sleeved top of his smallclothes, Brynja in her only dry garment, a sleeveless linen shift. Thorin looked up when Meisar did, catching the reddening of her cheeks when they met each other's eyes over Brynja and Bofur's heads.

Thorin's hair was gathered in a messy tail, and he was braiding the locks that hung loose in front at his temples, intently. Meisar studied the solid curve of his neck, dusted in hair halfway down his throat, and the thick fingers that threaded hair carefully, weaving tight plaits that were perfectly even.

She _was _warm, even as the sun began to sink slowly away from its high spot in the sky. It was an invisible heat, one that seemed to come from within, as unfamiliar as an untraveled land, and she shifted un-eased about in the grass. Dwalin was watching her too intently for her comfort. But when Freyda came about with her legs bare to the knee, his attention drifted away from Meisar, to her relief.

Her taciturn expression softened a bit against the glow of sun. She crossed her legs at the calves and slid a toe through the grass. Her feet were very small and pale, almost too small for her frame. Thorin studied the hasty, uneven ridges of the long plaits, which were as uncomplicated as his own, not like the intricate, adorned tresses many of them wore. Ori fixed the elaborate structures of braids his brothers sported, at the cost of his own jagged pudding bowl coiffure, and Emli was in constant maintenance of Gimli's beard and waist-long red hair that made him look so much like his father. Gimli, for his part, helped Oin care for his, seeing as his uncle was nearly deaf and slightly arthritic. Brynja, who could never stop touching Bofur's hair in the first place, made a public ritual of brushing and braiding it, at night and morning both, as courting dwarves would. Gyda and Freyda, both alone, minded each other's. And the brood of Bombur, with their efficient braiding circle, were always yowling and grunting and whining as they tugged mercilessly at each other's heads and chins. All of the dwarves in their caravan had someone to braid their hair, whether sweetheart or kin. Except the two of them.

Thorin tilted his head upward toward the sun and absorbed its warmth. Beside him, Dwalin watched Freyda practice her swings on the grass, bearing forth her battle-axe that bore her signature runes at its handle. Freyda, like Dwalin, was tall for a dwarf and fierce to look upon. Her beard, pale ashen blonde like her hair, extended in fluffy wisps halfway down her jawline and was decorated with clasps of bronze and sterling silver that clinked harshly when she moved.

Watching her was the first he had taken his eyes from Thorin. He looked at her as Thorin had not seen him look at a woman. _That _particular look was reserved for a plate of cookies, or so he thought until Freyda the iron-smith was spinning on her heels against the inertia of her ax.

He looked for Meisar and squinted at her, walking up and down the water's edge with her hounds circling about on a set of tracks. "Smells of orc, do it?" Freyda questioned between warrior-grunts that could rival Dwalin's in depth.

"Smells of something no good," Meisar furrowed her brow in Freyda's direction. When she neared Freyda tossed her a sheathed sword, which she caught by the handle. "Keeps the arms strong. If it smells of orc, ye best learn to fight," she said. Meisar raised the too-big sword. "I can fight, and we best get on the move, Freyda," Meisar advised, eyes narrowed in worry.

"Look lively, Shepherdess," she grinned at Meisar, heartily.

She turned around to see that Thorin and Dwalin were watching them.

"My king, Mister Dwalin," she muttered. Dwalin took a quick glance over the women's weapons and crossed his arms over his chest, skeptically. "No real need to for those, lass. It's unlikely they'll ever see battle."

"War is not the province of dwarrowdams, tis true," Meisar interjected as Freyda made indignant eyes at Dwalin. "But a strange beast is kindled when a dwarf-woman is comfortably armed, and threatened with danger."

Thorin nodded tacitly. But Meisar, like Dwalin, was suddenly without a hint of humor. "I would be grateful for any weapon I had at my disposal. They have served me well, and the dwarves I take east," she asserted.

"And you have used them?" Dwalin questioned, earnestly. "It would be just our luck," sighed Freyda.

"Foul happenings have crept out of the dark corners of the world. Even a king will need more than luck to keep them at bay," Meisar returned the sword to Freyda.

Freyda stepped forward and presented Dwalin with her ax for inspection. "This, Mister Dwalin, I made by my own hand. If my life depends on it, it ought be suitable for battle." "Let's see its worth," Dwalin challenged. Freyda was already smiling, her two front teeth turned in slightly. Dwalin drew his ax.

"We should be on our way," Meisar muttered, concernedly. "There is no time for sport."

Freyda held her own against Dwalin, so fiercely it seemed momentarily to frighten the hardened warrior dwarf. Her eyes were blue flames, berserker.

"You look surprised, my king," he heard Meisar observe quietly. Thorin turned his head toward her to see her heavy eyes lift in a wistful stare toward the sparring dwarves.

"Surprised? No. It is just that I have not seen Dwalin treat with a woman before." He flinched as Dwalin narrowly missed a blow of Freyda's ax on the back of his shoulder. "Or face such an ardent sparring partner."

"Freyda is not one to cross. Even for him, I dare say."

"I would not have expected it, but there are many things I did not expect, my lady."

It became obvious Dwalin's admiration her pale hair and finely decorated beard, and the strength of limb she displayed with pride. He could conceal many of his thoughts, especially the ill ones, but not so much the things that pleased him. For Dwalin, that had mostly consisted of killing orcs and baked goods. Good, he thought. Dwalin could use a hearty woman. Maybe it would distract him from other things.

"Aye, we have found ourselves in some unexpected company, and I am glad for it… even yours," Meisar continued. She dared only such mild cheek.

"Are you saying you do not find me agreeable?" he responded gruffly, but when she snapped around red-faced to see him, there was a hint of a smile. She hadn't realized how much she had longed for that smile, until it was there, and gone again so quickly.

"My king…" She stuttered and then half-chuckled. The stubborn lines at the corners of her eyes deepened when she laughed. She looked older than she was anyway, but her smile, a rare sight, outshined her weary visage.

"Meisar, I…" his voice went from steady and deep to utter silence.

"Milord?"

"It is nothing, _dunininh,_" he said quickly, brusquely.

She held her gaze stiffly at him, let herself study him. His face was not as creased or dour as she would have expected, from a dwarf who had shouldered so much. His skin was strangely smooth for a dwarf of his age and bearing, and his beard covered chin and cheek fully but it was short. She would have thought it grown to a goodly length by now being nearly two centuries of age. But she did not ask. There were many things she had endeavored not to ask him.

He was handsome though. Striking and regal, and as solid, and frozen, as ice.

Dwalin wiped the sweat from his head and shared a water skin with Freyda. He belched and turned toward Meisar, her eyes still fixed.

"What do you look at?"

"Long nights and places for foul things to hide."

"Aye," Dwalin sighed.

Meisar sighed with a cold eye at the horizon. "At least we are in agreement of that."

They moved when Meisar finally insisted they get on their way. They crossed over the open plain beyond the small interruption of woods and water where they had rested. Rocks thrust up from the earth created stone fingers pointed upward at the sky, still blue and boundless. The road was quiet but not for long. Soon there were men and women on horseback, looking distressed. A family passed on a wagon, forlorn children covered in ash. Soon more country folk straggled out along the road, weeping women with children clinging to them and men in various states of injury.

Thorin stopped, and flagged down a man who was on foot. He was long missing an eye and his hand was wrapped in bloody linen. "Good sir, what has happened?" Dwalin and Meisar fell back in deference behind him. Their three ponies were startled by the braying of four wretched nags, who were hauling an open cart. In its bed were a dozen deceased men, women and children. There was nothing to cover them with. "The village was attacked by orcs," said the man.

"We slaughtered the pack. But do not expect safe passage," a younger and much burlier man told them. He was covered in black blood up to his elbows.

"Speak plainly. What do you mean?" The man gave Thorin a withering glare.

"A few escaped. No telling where they've got or if they have friends they're bringing back with them. We're not sticking around to find out."

Meisar tipped her head to the passing men, Thorin bristling beside her. "We are ripe for attack. Slow moving target," growled Dwalin.

"Then we must keep moving," insisted Meisar. "We can clear these open plains before dark, make for the forests, if we move at speed."

"Have there been attacks like this before? Meisar?"

She didn't answer. "What does it matter? There's been attacks _now,"_ Dwalin half-hissed. _It matters_, Thorin's head raced at him, blocking out Dwalin's grousing. _I know not how but it does._

"There used to be many trolls in these parts. Not orcs," Meisar said finally, contemplatively. Her voice, low and unassuming as it was, snapped him back to the present.

"But so few trolls now." A hint of melancholy was in her tone. "You say it as if it were a bad thing, so few trolls," Dwalin snorted.

"I heard a rumor," she said. "That there were goblin hordes in the mountains, driving the trolls underground, to labor in the tunnels. They say they are harnessed like oxen and labor until they die."

"Labor at what? They were vanquished at the battle of-" Dwalin stopped himself.

"What any vanquished race would do- replenish."

III

By the time they found a halfway suitable place to make camp it was already dark. There were no fires and no supper. "_Mahal_ let the sun rise tomorrow," she prayed quietly to herself. The watch was tripled. The dwarves lay down in shifts for sleep but it came to none. By the second turn of watch, pure exhaustion overcoming fear, all but Virta had fallen asleep at their posts, as Urdlaug's snores rumbled deep into the forest.

IV

"_Du Bekar! Du Bekar!"_

A woman's voice was screaming in the night in the old tongue. _To arms._

Thorin woke with a start and there was a terrible pressure on his neck, grinding into his skin without mercy. A foot. Nasty and malevolent a limb, it pinned him. He heard the sound of bastardized Elvish, a single beady eye glaring down at him.

"Dwarf scum." A blade flashed and the one-eyed orc stood over Thorin with bloody cleaver raised. It gargled in its native tongue, a rotten grin upon its face.

Suddenly Dwalin was hurtling toward him, blocked by a pair of orcs which he slashed at with his axes in a fine berserker rage. "I should like his head!" came a separate ugly squeal, beside the orc that was readying to bring the blade down upon Thorin. Four, four orcs. There had to be more. Thorin reeled helplessly against the foot on his throat. "Hold still, or it'll be two swings. Maybe more!" came the repulsive tongue again.

An ax bluntly cut into the night air and landed squarely in the head of the orc pinning him. The weight released from his throat and he gasped as the orc buckled and tumbled down into the grass, mercifully dead, too mercifully. The ax had hit it square in the forehead, a throw was one of practiced ease, clean and precise in spite of the ferocity from which it had seemed to leave the assailant's hand. Black blood rained down on Thorin. Another orc fell, and with all its dead weight now laying prone upon Thorin's body, he was pinned effectively again. He thundered at his immobility as he heard the dwarves, male and female together, unleashing harsh battle cries into the night, and the screams of the orcs. He heard the clang of a frying pan and the crack of a skull. He heard roars as limbs were severed and high-pitched yelps as blades punctured ribs and lungs.

Of all the dwarves, it was Meisar who came and plucked the ax from the mangled skull of the orc and fell to Thorin's side. She called out for Dwalin to help move the dead orc from the king but he was occupied fending off an onslaught of three more.

"Shield him! With your life, lass!" he heard Dwalin roar at her. Grasper and Keeper issued simultaneous blows to the attackers surrounding him. Ori was near; the twang of his slingshot and a high whinny as an eye was gouged repeated twice over.

The half-dead orc that had laid mangled upon the grass sprung up again suddenly, causing Meisar to drop the full weight of dead orc back upon Thorin as it lunged for her. The awful squelch and snap of metal cutting bone and sinew assaulted Thorin's ears. He saw a chunk of the orc's head roll and it let him know she was the one still alive.

Two more orcs were upon them in a moment's time. A curved blade whistled toward Meisar's neck while she struggled again to move the orc from Thorin's body. It nicked her skin before Bifur leapt into the fray and drove a spear into its skull.

"His head! Bring his head!" Separate voices now rushed in, as did a clash of metal and bone. More black blood rained down on Thorin before the orc could claim his prize. Bofur and Bifur rammed a set of spears into its back simultaneously, sending the orc's arm reeling back as its nerves fried from spine and outward. Caught in its path, Meisar was flung off the ground and into the rock face. She hit the ground ragged as a paper-kite in a gale.

Then fell a sickening silence except for Dwalin's grunting as he hacked the heads from the last of them, and Bombur's daughters finishing one off with cooking ware. He heard the familiar frightened cries of the younger girls, and would have taken them into his arms himself to protect and comfort them, had he not been so _helpless._ It raged at him ,uselessly. A heavy, uneasy quiet returned to the night, thick with fear and trepidation.

Dwalin fell on his knees beside Thorin, checking him for severed appendages or great fountains of exsanguination. This time he found none, though Thorin was silent and dazed beneath a putrid, smearing layer of orc blood. "My king!" Dwalin thundered. "Awake! Speak now!"

He could hear Eda and Oin rushing in, the healers crying out his name. Dizzily, Thorin's rolled his head away and to his side. Meisar splayed out in the ground close to him, spattered in all manner of foul fluid, caused a swell of bile to rise in his throat. He glanced the severed orc head lying dispiritedly in the grass beside him. A great fragment of the skull was missing; brains that smelled of rotting meat unfurled into the earth. Dwalin shook him. His voice and the visage of Meisar spun before Thorin's eyes. Black blood ran in many tiny inlets through her hair.

His head spun and he could see neither her nor Dwalin any longer.


	6. EMBERS & FLAME

Meisar sat up on the low camp bed. Her head throbbed and her nostrils were filled with the scent of witch hazel. Soaking a bandage in some healing elixir, Eda lifted her arm and wrapped her wound. Meisar looked up at her with urgency. "The king?" she asked. "What of the king?"

A male voice murmured low and deep at a near-distance. "The king is here," the medicine-woman answered finally, seeming surprised. "He wishes to see you, Meisar."

Meisar did not have the time to rise from the makeshift cot before Eda had stepped away and let Thorin come and sit by her side. "Milord," she murmured softly. As she raised her head, she felt her chin resting in his hand. His fingers were rough at the tips, but their touch was surprisingly gentle. Harsh blue eyes studied her face with concern. "You've a cut on your neck," he observed.

"Yes. Only a small one though."

He turned her head to the side. A ring of bruises dipped down around the nape of her neck and showed more crawling in a blue-gray spatter into her scalp. "You took a nasty hit to your head."

Meisar rubbed the back of her neck self-consciously. "I suppose. I do not remember." Thorin pulled back from her, allowing him to peer more clearly into her eyes. She thought for a moment she saw something hesitant in them.

"You fought bravely in the night," he told her.

"It is my duty and my honor." Thorin's blue eyes were relentless as always, though lacking in harshness the way he looked at her now.

"I came to thank you."

"You are most welcome, my king. I-"

"Thank you," he repeated. He put his hand up to her cheek and held her face haltingly in the cup of his palm. His lips moved but no sound came out.

"My liege…?"

But he left then, without a word. Meisar put her hand to her cheek and sighed.

Siv was lingering about Eda; the healer nagged her to bring bandages, grind the pestle, help Balin to remove his boots so that she could tend a sprained toe or two. Oin and she joined their forces to treat sprains, cuts and rattled nerves. Potions made of herbs were ground into paste and wrapped around a cut on Ori's arm, an orcish blade, though Mahal was praised (not the least by Dori) that it had not been the poison-tinged lot. Siv slipped away while Eda tended to him, contenting herself to loiter near Meisar since Thorin had come looking for her. Siv, young and capricious, proud of her broad shoulders and hefting bosom, should have alerted Meisar to… something. She had near-black eyes that sparkled with a certain mischief that could be called lasciviousness. She scooted over to Meisar's side smoothly. "That was… tense."

"Siv! You've been knocked about the head too hard, with all these unbecoming thoughts I'd say," said Eda, exasperated.

"_He's_ the one been knocked about the head too hard, maybe in that battle, having a fancy fer a beardless lady."

"Don't speak like that. Don't you know that's how rumors get started?" chided Eda. She returned to her side and pulled the bandage tight over Meisar's arm, making her wince. "And besides, he is right. Our shepherdess was brave in his defense. He's got every reason to be gracious."

"Gracious? Looked like he wanted to kiss ye," Siv pressed on, jauntily.

"Oh hush cousin. It's not Thorin Oakenshield to take a liking to a lass, bearded or no." Her voice was sad. "I mean no insult to you my lady."

"None taken." Meisar made herself stand. She took a look around, head throbbing a bit. "Eda, where are we?"

"A few leagues ahead of where we made camp last night, unfortunate as it turned out. Crossed a stream during the night to throw them off." "Where did… the king?" Her head swam and felt hot.

"Had business to take care of. Think he went to the village."

"I suppose I should catch up." She stood, the ache in her head dulling. "My lady you should rest!" Eda called after her. But she was already gone. She turned crossly at Siv, thrust a mortar and pestle at her. "You walk a narrow line with that mouth of yours, Siv." "Not my fault I'm good at reading men," Siv half-purred half-sneered.

Eda drew back, grumpily. "There are some days Siv, when I wish you illiterate."

II

There was a path, no more than a beaten strip of dirt, leading off the Great East Road, toward a village. Smoke hung dark and low in the air beyond a line of trees. The smell- the smoke and the burned flesh and decay- should have warned her away but she was inevitably pulled toward it.

She passed through the line of trees on her pony, to see what had been wrought. A village had stood in the place that was reduced to smoldering piles of ruin. Nothing stood, nothing but a few blackened posts where fences, or homes, had stood. The earth was scorched black around the piles of burnt and still-burning wood. The dead livestock- cows and sheep and an errant pig- lay dead. The few surviving animals sniffed at them with palpable fear.

Carrion crows had done their unpalatable work on the dead that had not been burned to black, shrunken hollows of their living selves in the fray. She followed a trail of black blood to the village center where she found them, at work.

She cleared her throat cautiously, caught a breath of ash and stifled herself from choking. It was raining down on her like a soft, foul snow. "My liege!"

Thorin turned around. On a half-broken cart, salvaged from the ruins of the village no doubt, were the mangled bodies of four orcs. Two harnessed ponies were stamping about at the bridle, skittishly. Dwalin heaved a dead orc over his head and flung it down a well. As there was an ominous black smoke rising from it, the well must have been dry. Thorin poured oil down to follow, then finally a lit torch. More black smoke belched and growled its way up as orc flesh and offal ignited down below.

"Give us a hand?" Dwalin asked unthreateningly, but it was not a question, and she knew. She picked up the next of the orcs by the feet and Dwalin the head, the body awkward and diagonal with the difference of their heights. It mattered not as Dwalin pitched it headfirst down the well and spat after it. The fire made a sound unlike the familiar crackle of flame. It was a bellow, a sinister growl.

"All of the bodies must be burned. Their comrades won't trace them now," Thorin hastened to explain, unhappily. "Tell me, Meisar, what has happened here?"

"Orc attack, or do you not remember with that hit in the head." Dwalin made a curt nod at her bruised neck and ear. "We were led straight into their path."

The woman's cold dignity held solid in her face, but inside, it had melted, boiled. She exhaled angrily from her nostrils. "And had we gone ahead as you wished Mister Dwalin, and not made camp at Amon Sul, we would have been waylaid by a pack four times that size!"

"And how would you know that?" He half-slammed the last of the orcs down the well, splitting its body near in half on the stone edge.

She began to circle around with her hounds, stepping lightly on the torn-up and smoldering earth about them. "A pack of twenty-five at least besieged this village." The little brindle hound let out a high distinct chortle. "On Wargs."

"And you know because that cur has told ye? I am comforted, my lady."

"I trust a creature whose send of smell far exceeds my own," Meisar retorted, quietly. "Never once has been wrong."

"Suppose you'd know. Been out in these wilds long enough, too long for a dwarf anyway" Dwalin relented, however sarcastically.

"Why did you come back? To Ered Luin" Thorin asked her suddenly and sharply.

"You're standing on it."

Thorin wrinkled his nose against the acrid smoke still sputtering from the smoldering remains of the village dwellings. A sheen of water pooled in his eyes from it.

"There was a village not far the east of here, a market-town more like, not a wee outpost like this. And what I saw there, morning after they waylaid it… well, I started off for Ered Luin before the sun set again that night." A crow cawed in their direction, accusingly. Thorin untethered the ponies from the cart. Soaked in orc blood, he set it aflame. "It won't be the first or the last. Meisar, will you ride and clear us for a league? See that there are no tracks. I think we left none alive but we must be sure."

"Yes, milord." "Dwalin, ride with her. I will return and tell them to be prepared to move."

She watched him go off on the short trek back to the caravan, his proud shoulders, the ash caught in his mane of black hair. "Come then lass," ordered Dwalin. She acquiesced silently again, squeezing Jenny the pony's ribs lightly with her feet. "Ground to cover and not much time 'fore sunset. Let's get this business over with."

A pair of carrion crows flapped their wings and took off southeast along the flat, dry earth that stretched a league around the village in all directions. Meisar and Dwalin followed them as they went to the next meal. Two wargs lay dead ahead in their path. A crow picked at the eye of one, and started on the other, when the blood-sodden creature lurched in a vicious death-throe. Dwalin drove a spear into its throat, ending its misery. "Craven beast." The dwarf spat three times on it. "There are your wargs, lass. How many more got away?"

"Mister Dwalin…" What she had desired to say stuck in her throat. She had been right about Amon Sul. That was as much as she knew or cared to think, and she and Dwalin's dwarven stubbornness would not bore dividends on either side. That would have to be lived with. Yet, he had already seemed to adjudge her guilty of something else she herself could not comprehend. It was about Thorin. Of course it was about Thorin. The dwarves all looked after him, some more clandestinely than others. They feared for him and were utterly loyal to him, and she feared for him the same having never known him alas, and yet something entirely apart from fear had risen in her. Bloody warg prints trailed haphazardly over the dirt in front of them, blood coagulating with the dry earth. She sent the hounds ahead with a quiet command of "Warg," her throat feeling tight with fear. They sniffed and growled and led them to another mound of cold ember and bone. A dozen blackened warg skulls and rib cages twisted together on the pyre. "Villagers must have killed them."

"Aye, missed half the orcs though." He urged his pony around the pile so he could side-eye her. The hounds pattered back to her side silently; they had found no tracks.

"None can be blamed for what happened last night, not I, or you. These are dangerous times I am sure you know well enough already," she said.

"I know only what I see, lass, and I will not suffer my king to be killed all over again, not now."

"Nor will I."

"Good," he answered, flatly.

"I did as you asked of me, Mister Dwalin. I defended him, with the life in my body, the same I know you would do, and have before."

"I know lass. I know." His voice lessened in its harshness. True, he was hardened, anyone could see. But he was not cruel.

"Do you care for him?"

She looked at Dwalin strangely. "He is my king. Of course I care for him."

"As a king?"

"As a king."


	7. KINDLING

"Meisar, I must speak with you."

She turned and stood on her toes to peer over her pony's back, finding Brynja timorous, looking at the ground. "Are you alright? Do you have an injury? Eda and Oin…"

The wind had shifted. They were downwind of the dreadful miasma coming from the village now, and they could all smell it in the camp, the death and the fear of it. She had all intentions of telling them to move until nightfall. Brynja twisted a lock of braided nut-brown hair

"No, no, it is nothing like that. I have already spoken to the king of it. But I thought it right to speak with you also, in case you were to advise against it." "Well what is it?"

"Bofur and I will be married today. When we next make camp, my lady."

Meisar set down her swords and saddle-bag. "This is news." She gave Brynja a courteous half-smile.

Brynja came around to her side, as she un-saddled the pony and sent her off to take water with the others. "After last night, I am reminded of our mortality. We face grave dangers. If I should die along this road, I will die wife of my One." Meisar stood and braced Brynja around her shoulders, something assuring about the firmness of her hands that made the brown-eyed dwarrowdam ease. "You will not die. I will do all to see that."

"You don't seem terribly happy for me," Brynja pouted, giving Meisar a hung-dog look.

_And what did you expect of me, sweet girl? A face full of mirth, with no beard to grace it?_

"Bofur will make a fine husband, and you a loving wife. It is just… so sudden." She forced herself to smile at the bride-to-be, her neck and shoulders draped in Bofur's scarf, her hair braided like his with a pair of silver courtship rings clasping them. She looked so innocent and kind. How could any begrudge her?

"Yes I know it is sudden. He asked my hand in marriage only this night past. Asked the king's blessing and for Balin to make our vows sacred."

"And what did Thorin- the king- say of this?"

"It was King Thorin who urged Bofur to ask my hand in the first place."

II

In the shadow of stone, jutting out from a great rock face which shaded them, Balin read out the pronunciations of marriage, and Bofur and Brynja repeated their vows, swearing fealty and love until they were stone again. The dwarves stood in a circle around them as Bofur made a circle of his own, seven times around Brynja. She wore flowers in her hair and her best dress, white gauze embroidered in a delicate panel all down the front and all about the round curve of the neckline in deep cobalt-blue thread. Brynja, that shy, sweet girl who could neither read nor write, signed the marriage contract by drawing two crossed miners' picks, symbols of their heritage, their sameness, their _oneness._ It was read aloud, of course, so that each of the dwarves present might hear and retain all that was contained within, in case any of it were to be broken.

There was no time to make a proper veil so that she might be uncovered before him, prior to the saying of their vows, nor did she wear the bridal crown or circlet of precious metal that a dwarrowdam would don with her wedding attire. So the dwarrowdams improvised; they brought a fine lace curtain, dug haphazardly from Emli's stuffed wagon, to hold up before her and open when Bofur came to meet her beneath the stone. On her head she wore a crown of daisies, painstakingly threaded about blue-and-white ribbon that matched her dress. "A custom of exile, but a fair one nonetheless," she said coyly, as she held it in place upon her head, while Bofur worked patiently to make her marriage braid. He improvised and clasped it with a bit of twine and his boar-tooth earring. "When we come to Erebor lass, I shall make ye a crown of emeralds and diamonds, yellow diamonds, for your hair." Thorin's ear twitched at the sound of Bofur whispering it, along with a kiss, into her ear.

"Truly?" the dwarrowdam blushed. "It's in the contract, love, and a dwarf respects a contract." She burrowed into his cheek with her nose, took his moustache on the tip of her finger and twirled at it, blushing like the maid of only 84 years that she was.

_84. She looked like a child in comparison to him. If only Fili had been granted so many years. His people were understand, and forgive him for never having taken a wife. There was another in the wings, young and brave, who would be king after him. In only a few years, dwarrowdams from all the Seven Kingdoms would have clattered for his hand. Flattering him in Erebor in bright brocades with jewels in their beards. _

The hooting and the clapping of the present jolted him back, as the two shared another kiss that went on and on, as if they had no need of air. If he would never such sublime joy himself, then Bofur deserved it. Ever faithful, ever optimistic, Bofur had earned this rare and wonderful privilege, a One, and one as amiable, as good-hearted as Brynja. True, Ones were not _earned_ but determined by the Creator at the moment a dwarf was molded in his mother's womb, but aloneness, _aloneness _was earned. He pushed the bitterness back down into some metaphorical black pit he imagined inside his own body, appropriately around the heart he thought, but it felt lower, an ache at the very bottom of the ribcage. It was a sensation that spread in him from there to his mouth, where it felt very much like swallowing against a tongue full of salt or bitter herb.

As they parted their lips from each other, he took in the dwarrowdams who all stood on the other side of the circle from the men. He could feel each of their eyes on him, just as he could feel Balin's on the back of his neck, and Dwalin's. Dwalin was always so close he could feel his breath.

Meisar was the only one who seemed distant, against this awkward vigil over him that the others seemed to keep. He wished they would say something, to him, or through one of the other dwarves. He wished _she _would say something, her long wordless spells against the constant nattering of the dwarrowdams had been uncanny relief at first. Now it nagged at him, like an itch that no scratching would heal. He watched her for any sign than she may too learn to fear for him, even fear him. In the moment there was a tenderness in her eyes though, if not joy. It was subtle, a placated look that one might notice upon the face of a lady who smiled so seldomly. For all that the days past had brought, the joy of Brynja and Bofur seemed contagious. It was a rare and precious happiness, this love. To see Bofur as he was at that very moment eased the rigidity of his spine.

"Would my king do the honors and my lady Meisar, to pour for us the wedding mead?" Brynja requested. "I would, my lady." "And I," said Meisar quietly. She stepped forward to hold the chalice while Thorin poured, thick fingers curled about the bottle's neck, the lightest of tremors at the tips of his hands.

Her hands too must have trembled. The bottle clinked densely and lightly on the silver of the chalice, until it was full, and they stepped back, able to see each other more clearly now that they stood close in the gloaming light.

Thorin had taken the time to refresh his attire and see that his hair was combed and braids fixed. He looked regal, more a king than she had seen him in many days. _And for this occasion, purportedly at his urging, why not?_

Not for a second did he meet her eyes again than hers were at once sharp, then lowered. She had shirked the shapeless cloak of undyed wool and donned a half-cape of tan-and-green tartan fastened with a brooch of bronze. Her hair was washed clean of orc blood and ash, and braided anew. Her gaze came upward and focused at him again, and though he lowered his own quickly and fumblingly, he saw that it had drawn a slight smile from her, as modest and discreet as she was, but a smile nonetheless.

The bitterness on his tongue seemed to fade a bit.

They drank from the chalice of honey-mead until it was empty and they tasted it further from each other's lips. Hegi came staggering over and barged past Thorin before he could return Meisar that small courtesy, already drunk on something. "A gift, special," Hegi garbled in Khuzdul, directing the dwarves to her wagon. She roused Bifur, who was sleeping there, gave him a smack upside his head for missing the wedding.

Amongst the other foreboding lumps in her wagon, which were covered tight, Hegi unveiled a gargantuan barrel of Moria moonshine, the kind of spirits better suited to the heartiest of their hearty race. It was her own recipe, she bragged in Khuzdul, which should have warned any of them of its possible properties. It was gone before night fell.

In spite of frayed nerves, they willed themselves to make merry. There was ale, mead and Hegi's dwarven moonshine. Eventually the dwarrowdams took Brynja off to ready her for bed. She had made such of her wagon, its bed arranged in pelts of warg and bearskin, their worn-out bedrolls cushioned by a few extra blankets and a pair of goose-down pillows. Emli said a benediction over her, clad in only her sleeveless linen shift and the one good piece of jewelry she owned, a topaz necklace that matched her eyes. She looked nervous but entirely blissful.

"Yavanna, your daughters ask your blessing," imparted Emli. "Bless our lady, the fairest of all jewels in Aule's creation: the bride, the bearer of your children, whom you created first from stone, so stone may come to yield creation hewn of flesh and bone. For she is called the Giver of Fruits."

When their reverence had been properly observed, the dwarrowdams all burst into fits of nervous laughter. They bid Brynja drink more ale, and begged off at Emli's insistence eventually, so that she could counsel the bride on matters only a married woman could. They retreated, giggling, whispering bawdily, and settling at the edge of the camp or hiding under the wagons to catch a listen. A wedding after all was a rare treat, a wedding on the road, rarer yet. Half of them might go all their lives without ever seeing a dwarven couple join in their presence. Less than that would themselves marry. They savored the night, the ritual and joy, the possibility of something pure.

III

"It is predetermined, written in stone. There is no other way. If you have a One, he will reveal himself to you when he is meant to," insisted Emli, righteously, joining the huddle of dwarf women again. "A married dwarf has an easy time saying such a thing," remarked Freyda, wistfully. "For the rest of us, it's a wee tiresome waiting game, wondering if he's going to come along."

"Do you think I say such things for the sake of hearing myself speak?" asked Emli.

"Even if not, I wager you like that part just fine," quipped Siv.

Ignoring her, Emli sighed, wistfully. "If any of you ladies have a One awaiting you, I am only trying to help you recognize him when he comes."

"Here, here!" chuckled Freyda, raising a tankard of mead. "If my One is afoot, be a kind lass then and drop me a hint. That goes for all of ye, 'cos I'm far clumsier with men than I am with iron." There was a hint of hope in her self-deprecating shrug.

"Let us pledge then that we will all do the same for each other," suggested Gyda. The dwarrowdams toasted on it and swore. Gyda leaned over and whispered something in Freyda's ear and it made her smile. The two of them made eyes together toward Meisar, making her so un-eased it half-relieved her when Urdlaug came waddling in.

"All you'll do is get yourselves all worked up into a tizzy, seeing things that aren't there. Only disappointment in that lot," grumbled Urdlaug dispiritedly. Her huge, wide frame eased itself to sit upon the hard ground, bones creaking. The mood died a bit but the plate of blackberry tarts Urdlaug brought lifted it again.

"It is not to say we cannot hope, even for that which seems far off or impossible," Emli sighed wistfully. "I pray _Mahal_ should bring my Gimli a beautiful dwarven lady, a strong, big-hipped maid with a beautiful beard." "He is very handsome, Emli," grinned Siv.

"A beautiful, fine-bearded dwarrowdam of undebased reputation," Emli gave her a disapproving side-eye. "Sterling, I dare say."

"I hope he marries an elf, just to see the look on your face," Siv cursed, low enough under her breath so that Emli didn't hear. Or the sour-sweet pinch of the tarts might not be the only bite served that night.

The dwarrowdams passed around the tarts, more ale and mead. Against an instinct she was accustomed to, something inexplicable drew Meisar to stay with them. Their talk was eager, hopeful, talk that made even the older women blush and laugh coquettishly as if they were girls in that awkward stage again, filling out at the hips, wearing gaudy jewelry, in constant turmoil over the state of their beards.

"I do not want to be married," asserted Lulia against their saccharine swooning, a proud and self-assured look about her. Her elder sisters nodded vigorously in agreement, all stubbornly unmarried. "I want to be have my own forge under the mountain. I'll make anything from swords to cooks' knives, to steel needles even, so the ladies of Erebor can sew jewels onto their gowns." Small and square and stocky, Lulia donned mail like a warrior, a great belt set about her waist, hair worn in several long plaits with a messy fringe over her forehead. She had a short beard, thin as twine, braided at the chin. None could imagine her promenading about in velvet and diamonds, but if the re-conquest of Erebor, and Thorin's unexpected return, had taught them anything, it was that the impossible often was far from it.

"If I have a One, I pray he comes soon. I'm not getting any younger," sighed Freyda. She craned her head this way and that and squinted into the dark of the camp, as if looking for someone. "You will know him when you see him. The creator gives us but one love, and does not let us miss them when they come," harped Emli. "Why, the moment I lay eyes on Gloin I knew he would be my husband."

"A perfect love story for the ages I'm sure," quipped Siv, rolling her eyes.

"You'd like every dwarf you lay eyes on to be your husband, Siv! All at once," teased Lulia. "She don't have a One. She has a one-at-a-time," Freyda hastened to add. "You're a queer fish for a dwarf then, Siv. That is not our way. Dwarves love once, haven't you heard?" snapped Emli.

"Me a queer fish? Why I'm not the one who…" she grumbled in a weak protest that trailed off and ended with her folding her arms crossly.

"What about you Meisar? Do you want to marry?" inquired Gyda innocuously.

The girl's voice startled her. "I… I don't know." Suddenly feeling hot about the neck and face, her focus darted around avoiding the sharp gaze of Siv's black eyes. The other dwarrowdams were looking at her less intently, but just as curiously. "Well," said Emli, putting an arm around her shoulder and making her flinch. "You haven't a choice in that matter. If Aule has decided that you shall have a One, you will meet him. It is unavoidable."

Her voice caught in her throat. She wasn't used to this, a group of women prying her for an answer, to a question she had never once asked herself. "If it is in my future, then it is," she decreed finally. "Now is time for my watch."

"Just remember," Emli called after her. "There are no chance meetings in this world."

IV

"Reporting for watch, milord." She approached and gave Thorin one of her now-distinct curtsies, so stiff and clumsy as if she would lose her balance bending her knees, not that she had far to fall even if she did wind up flat on her face. She was so very small, Thorin observed quietly to himself_. _Small, but unyielding; she may yet prove more tenacious than ever he could have anticipated. That was good. Good enough.

"Should be Brynja, this time around," remarked Dwalin, drunkenly. "Mister Dwalin, Brynja has just been married."

"And where have our newlyweds gone?" Thorin asked. Half the dwarves had flown off to the edges of the camp to spew their suppers along with the shine. The strongest, and the soberest then, took watch. "To the bride's wagon," said Meisar. She gestured to Brynja's painted wagon with its heavy canvas top. From inside filtered out the dim illumination of the lantern, suspended above the bed of it. It showed the shadow of Brynja's gown hanging up. Just below it moved the shape of Bofur's hat. Forth, and then back, and forth again.

"Pray they do not break the axles," Dwalin said without a smile. In the distance the groan of wheels was followed by the hushed, uneasy laughter of the dwarrowdams over in their huddle. "Away from the hens I see, shepherdess. Their talk must bore ye to tears." He grunted sarcastically.

"I think you do not know women very well, Mister Dwalin," she said quietly. Dwalin got a queer look about him, and she said no more.

"A happy occasion fer sure. Could have done without another delay though," Dwalin finally hastened to say, eyeing Meisar.

"Well… the animals needed to rest and regain themselves. You know they become skittish after attacks like that, better chance of spooking and bolting… then you'd really have a delay. They need their rest…" she rattled off.

Her jumbled tongue betrayed nothing, certainly not the sudden irritation that rose in her at Thorin's silence, if this all been at his urging. If Brynja had not in her innocent way heard something different than what she was meant to, if this was not some strange jest being played at her-

"Sit then, _dunininh_," he commanded. "I would speak with you anyhow."

She eased herself down to sit, her distance from him too obvious. He was a king, she reminded herself. How had she dared to be so forthright earlier, to meet his eyes in the company of all of them, to smile? Eda was right. Rumors would kindle, and rebuke, and all trust in her, even amongst her own people, might be forsaken. Or some offense might be given to this dwarf that was their king back from the proverbial dead, their gold-sick king and his sister-sons cold in their tombs, cold as the stars above, and as distant, and compelled to redeem the power of love for an old comrade, if it were to be believed. If only he would say. If only he would look at her. His eyes were so woebegone and resplendent. She was standing on a shore as the tide pulled out, and took her into its depths unresisting. Not once in her life had she seen the sea…

There was something still alive and good, that she had come so close to seeing plainly, like the opening and closing of a door. If only she had the gall to ask outright. Thorin sat beside her wordlessly and smoked a pipe of strong, dry tobacco. His silence was heavy, and Meisar turned her attention stoically to the deep of the night. The sole light, the lantern in the newlyweds' wagon, had dimmed and darkened altogether. The strains of their coupling still carried on the silent night, a lull of strained breath followed by the inevitable crescendos. Thorin had said he wanted to speak with her. Of what she had no mind to guess, and though he was wordless while he smoked, his face regained its previous distance. She willed she would not break the silence between them, even if a nagging instinct inside her told her it was better to be broken than not. Listening to two dwarves on the night of their wedding could be an amusing if sporadic pastime, but with every yelp and throaty keen in Khuzdul coming from Bofur and Brynja Thorin stiffened. He folded his arms in front of him around his sword. Dwalin had drifted off, helped by a bit of the moonshine, and was snoring, upright against the rock face. Meisar's brindle hound sniffed about him, only to be sleepily swatted away with the back of his huge, tattooed hand. The cur slunk back to Meisar's side and buried himself in her tan-and-green cloak.

"I am sorry that he speaks to you so roughly. He does not easily trust or tolerate many," Thorin muttered apologetically.

"There is no need for you to apologize. He protects you, and that is admirable."

Thorin rubbed at his bruised throat. "And do you think I need protecting?"

She stared at him blankly for a moment, her mouth dry. The tuft that swept raggedly over the underside of his chin and the upper part of his neck was less coarse. His throat was bare from the tip of that tuft to its baseline, and his layers of armor and clothes were impenetrable and heavy. The slightest hint of bare skin was visible where throat and collar met, leaving a small sliver exposed. When the dragon Smaug was slain, the talk was of a foreboding armor all about his being, with a single chink at his chest which the black arrow had pierced. The weakness, the vulnerability of that single entry point, which could change everything, whether for better or for worse. She had never felt so much like a black arrow stirring in its bow.

"I… I think we all do, one time or another," she said finally.

Looking back at her, his eyes felt terse. He blinked, and their regal iciness melted a bit. "Aye. That is true enough." He put aside his sword and took her hound, the russet-and-white nestling between his boots, onto his knee and stroked at its fur. His thick fingers moved with uncanny gentleness on the animal's back. A smile began to form but he seemed to stop himself. "Thank your hounds for their services as well… my lady… Meisar." No sign could be read in his face that a smile might arise, but he looked… at least un-disturbed for the moment.

Had Siv been right too? That errant-minded girl and her naughty tongue. Oh, she was too smart for her own good, always seeing and saying too much, on subjects she had no business knowing so much about. Had she seen the way she had looked at him? The meeting of their eyes over the newlyweds' kissing into oblivion? The flame hiding just beneath her cheeks?

"He has seen your die and come to life again. More or less. What else would any of us do under the circumstances?" Meisar mused, her voice thick and murmuring, eyes on her hands.

The space between her and Thorin had shrunk by the width of a sitting man, and she was not even sure who hastened to narrow it.

"My lady, I think perhaps… "

Her throat tightened. Had Dwalin besmirched her when they reached the camp? Or worse, had Eda been right about rumors, and the talk of the dwarrowdams not fallen on Dwalin's deaf ears- or Thorin's- in spite of his professed disinterest in it? She remembered too how her hands had trembled at the wedding, how he had looked at her across the circle, which had served to do no more than unnerve her when she thought back upon it. He was not a stupid dwarf blind as he could be to other things, or so she had been told in woeful tongues again and again by the dwarves, of his tribulations, recent and distant.

She looked up at Thorin again, mustering her courage, with her deep, solemn eyes waiting for him to continue. When he did not and the silence between, the lost look in his eyes, finally started to become tense, she took a breath, willing herself to say what had been on her mind to say.

"I meant to tell you earlier my king, much earlier that I am sorry, for your lo-"

"_Mahal!" _Dwalin sprung back to consciousness with a start, as a keening mewl and moan pierced the night. It settled into a happy, placated lull of soft sighs that carried yet, which Dwalin scowled and cursed at but Meisar let seep into her psyche. It was a sweet sound, as something of its nature had never been to her. A kind husband he would be, a gentle dwarf, Bofur, Meisar thought silently. He cared for her. He would do all to make her happy, please her…

Dwalin came to, hauled himself up to sit and did so between them. Only then did she realize that the space between them had been no wider than Dwalin's own width; his weaponry-belt nudged her to scoot to her right.

"I do suppose they could keep it down," Meisar fanned herself in spite of the cool, dense night air. One moment she was ablaze, and the next even the summer night felt colder than death. Thorin and Dwalin were both narrowing their eyes at her, as she felt her skin cycle rapidly from mercurial flush to icy pale. "Are you alright, _dunininh_?" Thorin queried lightly. He looked at her now as he had that morning, eyes with concern, his hand at her cheek.

"Yes," she responded. "Yes my king. I am fine. I am, truly."


	8. A DARKNESS BEFORE DAWN

It was dark when he woke again, and he was home. He wandered the great halls, the mazes of stairs and mezzanines. A silent Erebor, empty of all life except his own. The high mountains of gold still covered the floors of the great city, in ranges, run through with valleys where a king might walk amongst them. Walk amongst them he did, all glittering and full of light, filling the great chamber with it, where all around him was dark, abandoned. He was alone with his gold and wanted to get away from it. The towering mountains were clinking as if a light quake had come from under them. He climbed the stairs, slippery with it, to cross a great stone bridge that led down through the Gallery of the Kings. The tapestries adorning the great walls high above flapped in a cold wind that was blowing from the outside. They were torn, eaten away by moths. Stone likenesses of his forefathers seemed to gaze down with forbidding empty eyes upon him, on all sides.

He looked at his hands and found they were smooth, in rings of sapphire instead of forge-made calluses. He was in blue and gold and ebony furs.

Ahead there was a light, a small flame guttering high above the dark city. The wind changed; it was hot. A hot wind replacing the icy breaths of the oncoming winter, from the outside, and also from within the mountain hall. Clammy sweat pooled at his temple and on his palms. He walked and walked and walked, his pace quickening.

On the throne a weeping figure bowed his head beneath the effervescent glow of the Arkenstone. It was Fili, his beard grown long and golden. He heard a woman's voice calling out at a distance. _Dis? _He called her name but no sound came out of him. The girl's voice emerged high and small again. "_Do you feel the wind, Taras? It's so hot."_

"Dis!" He called again but she didn't answer. She sounded like a little girl, but Fili was aged, his beard grown down his chest and woven thru in gold. He was alone. There was no Kili. No Dis. No Thrain or Thror.

"_Don't leave me Taras. I am scared of the wind. It feels funny."_

He tried to run, but his legs felt like stone, along the narrow bridge that led to the throne. It began to tremble beneath his feet, stymying his pace. "Fili!" he called. But the king did not see or hear him. Gold fell through his palms like water and tumbled down from the platform. Below the mines were all filled with smoke and it was rising.

"_Then give me a coin for the pony_," the girl's voice came again. _"I want to sit on the black one with the gilded reins."_

"_Dis!"_ He screamed her name and with his cry a great crack split the halls and following it a great rumbling that shook him nearly from his feet. He was nearly to the throne and crawling, the only way he could maintain his balance and not tumble down from the bridge.

"Fili!" The jagged funnel of stone above him crumbled, and with it, the throne. Fili sat, transfixed by the gold coins, one handful after another, pouring from between his fingers. They tumbled into the abyss, gold pouring down after it from the broken floors and Fili's hands. The throne buckled and fell, the Arkenstone falling onto Fili's breast. He clung to it, even as gold fell upon his head, coins, goblets, great long necklaces of it like rivers, veritable whirlpools of gold in a raging sea of it, as stone crumbled and fell around it. Could he not see that he would be buried alive? He screamed his name again and again, clinging to a beam of stone, willing himself back onto a gray boat of broken rock that had been the throne's support. "Fili, to me!"

He stumbled down broken stairs when the tides of gold carried him backward toward a solid standing case of steps in the otherwise crumbling nave, chasing the fallen throne, and his nephew as all were swallowed up into the raging glittering tide. "No! No! No!"

He called for Fili. He called for Dis, and Kili, but all the voices had stopped. All that remained was the abrasive clank of metal, millions of gold trinkets and coin tumbling down, stone tearing above as if by unseen hands.

Far below hot metal was melting. He could smell it, feel the heat rising up through the solid sea. He swirled down helplessly with the falling, melting gold. He crawled on his knees to the bottom of the great stairs, broken, cracking, the walls and arches above him groaning. _Fili, Kili Fili Kili._ He screamed their names over and over but had it made a sound, it was overwhelmed by the breaking of the city around him. The great high doors, of the solidest oak, groaned and bowed forward, falling and splitting down upon the mass of gold and crumbling stone.

And then the walls fell from the great terraces at the front of the city, looking out where the city of Dale would have stood. But all he could see was a blinding light rushing in, fire-wind singing away his beard.

"_Where are you Taras? Taras, come back. I see fire."_

II

He woke with a start to find Dwalin hunkering beside him. "Arise my king. Break you fast."

Balin touched his shoulder and he lurched upward to sit from his bedroll, nested in the same place he had fallen asleep on watch the previous night. He shook the grass from his hair, muttering the names, cursed as they were to him, too low under his breath for any to hear, half-awake and dazed. His temples ached. "Thrashing about again, my king," disclosed Balin lowly. "Are you unwell?" He pulled his hand back from Thorin's shoulder as he winced at the reminder. "Dreams is all, Balin." The old dwarf pressed his lips together in worry and made a small, helpless sound.

Thorin wrinkled his brows and raised his hand to wipe the cold sweat from it, as Yrsa and Anbur came about to them with hot loaded plates. "Your majesty," the girls gawked together, curtsying in unison. "Kind of you lasses," Thorin forced a smile at the two, so cheerful they were, even little Yrsa, with her mangled hand stuck in her mouth, quaffing what was left on it from breakfast. They were still in their dress clothes from the previous night, their velvet pinafores rumpled. _Was there anything good left in this world, if not their faces? _"Best you run along, before your sister sees your good clothes are dirtied." "Wait, this one is for Meisar," Anbur said directly to him, setting the last plate upon the flat rocks above where Meisar's empty bedroll and mantle lay rolled up neatly. "Where has she gone?"

"Don't know. Left early before sunup. Reckon she'll come back soon," Freyda's voice came in, jolly for so early a morn. She handed Dwalin a steaming clay cup. "What is this?" he asked, sniffing it suspiciously.

"Try it. You'll like it." She winked at him and he gave her an approving half smile.

"Well then, we've got chicken apple mash, a bit o' cornbread, and this sundry grog the lass had made," Dwalin said, passing Thorin a plate. He took it listlessly, his throat suddenly feeling raw, as if he had been screaming. He picked up a hunk of the cornbread and willed his hand not to shake, not in Dwalin's presence. He had shouldered too much already. A friend was good for him, a lady.

Dwalin ate fast and washed it down with a gullet full of whatever was in the cup. He made a face and spit it upon the grass. "Made it just for you, Mister Dwalin. That's how you thank me?"

"What is it?"

"Coffee, from the Southron lands. Me da was an armed escort for merchants traveling that way. Haradim traded it for weapons. Scary folk he said, covered their faces with black silk and wore coal around their eyes like the girls do in Bree at the grotty inns. It is good, though, I promise. Drunk strong and black the best."

"You beg me drink like a Southron in eye rings like a doxy night lass amongst men?"

"No, Mister Dwalin. You're stubborn and narrow and it's a sight to see ye try new things."

Balin laughed at this and Dwalin's lips made a pouting, grumbling stance. Dwalin never liked directives, or the exotic, Thorin half-expected he would see an affront in it and up and leave. After all, who was she but a woman who seemed so strangely fond of his company?

Before he could ponder their unexpected company any further, a visage invaded him, at all of his senses, when he caught the aroma of the rejected beverage its contents sloshing about the edges of the cup in dark trickles. He could see Thror, seated at his writing-desk in his chambers, with a steaming golden mug of it, strong-smelling and black in the cup. He had nipped some of it out of curiosity when his grandfather's back was turned. He could not remember the taste of it, only the restless night that followed.

"It was brought to Erebor, in the days of old, by merchants to the south. My grandfather was fond of it," he reminisced quietly. Balin's placid smile was suddenly wistful. "Ah yes, yes, I do remember." He nicked the cup and drank what was left in it.

Dwalin grinned; he patted Freyda's back, the way male dwarves did each other's, hard but not rudely. It made her laugh. "You're kind, lass. Next time let the "Urs handle the food, and the Southrons their… coffee." He let out a long chuckle that seems uncharacteristically at ease. Freyda passed him a silver flask and he gulped from it. "That's more like it," he grunted.

"He's friendlier when he's got whiskey in him, isn't he majesty? Might I tempt you with a nip, my king?"

"No, thank you," Thorin muttered. When he sat again Dwalin drew away from Freyda and close to his side. He half-wished he would stay by her. "Where has Meisar gone?"

"Should be back soon," Freyda assured. "We'll leave her to rouse Bofur and Brynja I suppose. No better task, eh?"

"I am here my king. You have summoned me?" Meisar came around before him, her fox-red hound cradled in her arms like a babe, the other two nipping at her heels. _Did those curs follow her everywhere?_

His voice caught in his throat. "I only… wondered where it was you had gone," he muttered. White brows raised out of the corner of his eye, but Balin said nothing.

"I always come back. That's what's important I suppose." "It is," Balin said kindly. "You have done honorably my lady. You are looking well." She sat, a gracious glance turned at Balin.

"The girls left breakfast for you," Thorin said quietly. "Ah, a good full one. Thank you my king," she smiled timidly, and started on the cornbread, as Freyda urged a seemingly reluctant Dwalin away. Balin had gotten up and left seemingly of his own accord already. Her smile, and her ease, faded inexplicably, alone with him again, the king.

_As a king_, she thought stonily, but she could not forget how Freyda and Gyda had giggled and whispered and looked her way. She had seen the way Freyda looked at Dwalin sometimes, but-

"It is cold I fear," mumbled Thorin.

"No fault in that; could be worse. We have starved before, haven't we?" There was silence between them again, thick, and uncertain as ever. She liked it not.

"It was noble of you my liege, to allow-"

He made a dark snorting sound before she could finish. "…To allow respite for a wedding, for Brynja and Bofur," she finished, her voice stilting. Silent again, she searched for words between bites. The mash was best, sopped up on the cornbread even better, but suddenly her stomach tightened around it, her throat narrower. "They were very happy, you should know."

"A fool's errand. But who am I to deny true love?" She detected a dark hint of sarcasm on his tongue. His face grew weary and melancholy again, unthreatening but dark. "He has been loyal and true through all. Am I in any position to deny him?"

She shook her head timorously, but she deigned to face him now, to look into his eyes. . He sighed, a shiver in his back becoming heat, a memory of sweet-grass and pipe-weed, and warmth. The shape of her fingers, always curling tight about whatever she was holding, as if…

"My king, you gave Bofur not just your blessing to marry, but half an express command it seems. Or so I have heard."

"What of it?" It came out with a harshness he had not intended. She recoiled a bit and the will that had been in her gaze dropped, eyelids drawn again. He saw Bofur in his mind's eye, the joy upon his face when the vows were made official by Balin, and Brynja's laugh just before she retired. If only in his own long, seemingly endless nights he had seen something as heartening, better than a crumbling city and his head ringing the cries of the dead. Fili and Kili and Dis, crying out for Taras, a trusty servant was it? A sentry that shadowed them? Or one of Dis's governesses? Whoever it was, there had been no sight, no mention of the name since the day of the dragon, and he wished not to think of it any longer. The weed from his pipe tasted unbearably bitter on his lips again. _A fool's errand._

A lament rose in his throat for her but it was dry and pitiful. _Meisar. _She had done her duty to him, protected his life; he owed her better than this, better than-

Shame pattered in his lungs as his breath caught, the pipe-smoke in his mouth growing sour. She bowed her head, away from him, scraped a trembling hand along the last of the mash on her plate, before letting the dogs finish it instead. "Nothing, my king." She stood, suddenly. "I will rouse Bofur and Brynja. I suppose if anyone should have that duty, it is me."

III

She was relieved to find that Bofur was awake and outside his wagon, in naught but his boots, bracers and small-clothes. His arms were stretched up toward the sun as if in celebration, and his braids were out, his hair a fine mess. The sight made her smile. She cleared her throat in Bofur's direction. He turned around and smiled broadly at her. One half of his moustache was up, the other pointed down and looking slick. "Ah, shepherdess. My wife would have a word with ye."

Meisar pushed back the curtain with some hesitation. Brynja lay on the pallet, amid the twisted layers of their bedrolls, blankets and pelts. She was covered in a bear-pelt from her shoulders to her knees and they were each bare. Her cheeks, beneath the honey-brown fluff of her beard (most ardently mussed) bore a soft, peachy glow, warm with affection, warmer with a sheen of perspiration. Her shift along with Bofur's clothes were crumpled together in the corner of the wagon, his hat hung up beside her wedding dress. She stretched her arms and wrapped the pelt around her torso, scooting bare-bottomed over the wagon bed to sit on its edge, legs dangling over carefree and crossed daintily at the ankles. She was a soft girl, thick-limbed and broad-shouldered, but delicate somehow. Perhaps it was the way she looked at Bofur, as if it were the first time she had ever laid eyes upon him, love-struck at first sight.

"I wished to thank ye for letting us to stop and marry. Ye have brought us great happiness by it." She patted the edge of the wagon beside her invitingly, but with an obvious command about it. Even sweetly Brynja had Emli's stubborn determination when she wanted something.

"You can thank Thorin for that. I defer to him in that matter."

""Twas a bonny affair, milady." She smiled dreamily. Bofur turned back to wink at her, a hunger in his eyes.

"I pray you were happy last night," Meisar said quietly, awkwardly twitching against the heady body-scent left by their togetherness. "Something tells me it was a success."

Brynja laughed. "You are cheeky when you want to be."

"I meant no jest," Meisar protested, suddenly. "I only meant… I, supposing Emli counseled you well…" She felt the unfamiliar blush well up, awkwardly.

"Of course, of course. _Mahal _knows I needed it. In Ered Luin my da would have hided him raw he saw him tumblin' out me window in the morn. Anyway, he never was clever enough to sneak in. And then he left to kill a dragon. I didn't think he live to tell me about it."

"I suppose we did not think Thorin would turn up alive either," she muttered, with some misgivings. She caught herself and smiled, innocuously. "_Mahal_ be thanked, for your sake that at least Bofur did." The girl remained jubilant and gape-mouthed with bliss.

"But he did. Oh he did, and now he has made me his wife, in true." Brynja rested a hand on Meisar's shoulder, looked her squarely in the eye. "We too are possessive, we dwarf women. We don't give away nothing that is ours so easily. Not our love especially. And love is… well it is… ye know, don't ye?"

"No," she answered plainly.


	9. HURMUL

**A/N**- Hurmul- Honorable

Brynja and Bofur roused and Urdlaug's wagon packed for travel when all the dwarves were fed, they waited for some order from Meisar, half of them dawdling though the morning was half through. The shepherdess groused against the hiccupping, spinning-headed company that had dragged their feet up out of their bedrolls and would have liked to let breakfast settle before they got on the ponies again.

She and Freyda went off with the dogs to ride half a league ahead through the tall, narrow passes of rock that awaited them on the borders of the Lone-Lands. They carried flares, made by Hegi; one flare was highwaymen, and two, orcs. They were to leave the wagons and flee as fast as they could on the ponies in the narrow pass, if they saw two.

Thorin moved stealthily amongst the remaining dwarves, barking orders at Donbur to clear the ashes from their fires, Nori to finish his morning grooming and Bifur to shake off the bellyful of shine that was rendering him immobile. He would have accompanied her himself had Freyda not seemed so strangely insistent. Atop Minty the Second, he watched as Bofur helped his wife onto the pony they shared. Maneuvering delicately to settle herself in the saddle, she winced, as if with soreness, smiling though alas. Once Bofur was mounted, they could be on their way.

_A thing of good, of utter good, _he reminded himself. He looked for Meisar but she had already gone.

II

"Keep your hand on the flares, Freyda. We are in a land of cold men," Meisar instructed, dead serious. "My lady, men have not inhabited these lands for an Age, since the forests were felled," said Freyda. "There are still small tribes of savages in the old woods, who are not friendly toward travelers. They'll take our provisions and have us on spits." Freyda made a small gulping sound. "Rangers in these parts have told me they have come further south than ever before. But they are not the ones I'm worried about." She sent the hounds ahead into the tight pass.

As the dwarrowdams followed at a few paces behind, Freyda tightened her thighs about her pony's flanks, both hands clasping at the flares.

A small mirror fastened to the end of a spear was held aloft and unsteadily in Meisar's left hand, her head craned at an unnatural angle so that she might glimpse what was above. The road was little more than a weather-beaten path, growing over from lack of maintenance. On either side rose high walls of solid rock. All was awash in silence, except for the low whistle of a mild breeze coming through.

She rode quietly while Freyda eyed her nervously again and again. Finally she sighed loudly with some trepidation. "Meisar, might I speak to you as one lass to another?"

"Of course, Freyda. What is it?" Freyda pulled ahead to ride beside her. Their ponies were nearly touching and irritated with each other, nipping and neighing. Her stomach tightened grievously, remembering the vexed tone Thorin had taken toward her. Freyda had seemed all too eager to leave them alone together. But it was not Freyda that dropped her stomach down deeper into her gut and twisted it with regret. _His_ words, all three of them, had lashed her, and the thought of how his eyes had darkened made her weak with regret. Nothing had ever made her feel so ill of herself inside, or as injured.

"Mister Dwalin!" she answered in an aggrieved voice. "Mister Dwalin?" Meisar repeated, bemused. "What of him? Has he been unkind to you?"

Freyda shook her head in anguish. "He accepts my company at the cook-fire, even laughs at my jokes, and then he ignores me!" In her coat of mail, her gauntlets heavily studded and her beard adorned in silver that gleamed forebodingly like needles, she would have been entirely frightening in countenance had it not been for the look of pure, girlish angst upon her face.

The dwarrowdam pouted her lips sullenly. "I'm having… feelings." The last word came out awkwardly on her tongue, as if she could not get used to the sound or concept of it.

"I'm sure it is not out of any distaste for you, Freyda. I'm sure he feels the same about… feelings," added Meisar, her own awkwardness coloring the word. "And you know that he must keep himself to Thorin more oft than not."

"And what about Thorin?"

"What about him?"

"He was betrothed once you know," Freyda blurted out suddenly. "To a Firebeard lass with red hair. I'm supposing she died, or Erebor was laid to waste before they could marry."

"Oh Freyda, I wouldn't know… much about that," she stumbled. But she did. She knew how her cheek stung with her own regret, as if she had been slapped outright by his own hand.

"Sometimes he looks at you," Freyda said quietly. "Thorin."

"And is that what you and Gyda whisper about when you look at me? Or Siv been flapping her mouth about the lasses? Why that girl, I'll shake her!" She swallowed hard, keeping her eyes trained at the bend in the pass.

"No! That is why I tell ye these things in confidence, my lady."

Meisar lowered her head apologetically. "I am sorry, Freyda. I did not mean to snap."

"Apology accepted my lady. But ye must think sometimes, that there must be a reason we have met them here on the road," said Freyda hopefully. She leaned in toward Meisar with a lighter countenance. "You know, I do find him quite handsome. It makes a wee… thing in my body when I see him. I can't really explain. It's like a wee flutter and it makes me head dizzy," she confessed, her face twisting with mortification. Meisar gave her a mild smile, meant to comfort but she knew from the look in Freyda's eyes it was doing anything but. "I only wish, Freyda, I could be of better use in this quandary."

The hounds returned, assuring there was no imminent danger around the bend. Her own head felt light. _No chance meetings in this world._ How Emli had smiled, so righteously, so assured, when she said it, and to Meisar rather than Freyda no less, as if she expected it to mean something to her. How unwise she was to the ways of lone folk, Emli, the proud wife and mother.

_No, perhaps not. _If her sense of time was accurate, she had come out of the wilderness, started on her trek west to Ered Luin from the wilds, a year and several months to the day. One journey to the east taking a caravan of eight, and a solitary return to the west with a few inexplicable delays, and now east, again. In time to have met a king and his company upon the road. A king who had several times taken to her company, forsaking the company of those who had been his faithful brothers in arms, who protected him with such vigor, that she could never match, even if she had shielded him with her life once already…

"Freyda," she advised softly. "The king is burdened with much. Let us not add to them."

III

Over the days Balin kept his attention on Erebor, all the things that had been done in his absence, and everything that awaited him upon their arrival. Already he was giving out directives, which Ori scribbled at breakneck pace in his great book, wobbling side to side and using his pony's cranium as a writing desk. "Our homeland is ours again, my king. Every day it is more renewed, and grows strong and prosperous."

"I owe that to many others, much less than myself. To you, and to Gloin especially, in my… absence."

"Without my father, there would be anarchy under the mountain," Gimli butted in, self-assuredly in the brash way that his father was.

"Gimli, my son, do not boast. It is most unbecoming of a well-born lad," chastised Emli. "Though it is true my husband has made himself quite useful. I don't suppose a seat of high honor at your council is out of the question?"

"Mahal keep you Emli. You are a force to be reckoned with," chuckled Balin nervously.

"Your husband is a shrewd man, and I owe most of our fortunes to the generosity you have shown with yours. He will be granted all that is due him, and then some," assured Thorin.

"Gloin a shrewd man? Indeed, but nothing happens except by our combined efforts I assure you that, even when we are apart. I should think some office might be on the horizon for myself as well."

"Mother!" squawked Gimli.

"Anarchy under the mountain indeed," she continued, waving off Gimli's protest. "Alas, without me, he would be a miserly feckless wretch. Do not think I had no role in opening his purse to your quest. And without him, well," she beamed and reached across her pony to clasp Gimli's chin adoringly between her thumb and forefinger. "I would not have my precious boy. The jewel of his mother's eye."

"'_Amad _please, the lads will see," begged Gimli. "Be not ashamed of your mother's love, Master Gimli" admonished Thorin with a sad smile. "Look after her always."

"I promise, majesty. Promise with all my honor on the line." The young dwarf's mouth tightened, sadly. He remembered.

Emli nodded, silently. She looked at Gimli and tears welled up in her eyes, but she did not let Thorin see.

IV

After what seemed like an endless day of riding and jostling along the rough, rocky road with their wagons, they made camp.

Thinking of Freyda's dilemma for Dwalin, Meisar put the two of them to last watch, seeing if it would render any of her questions answerable, for better or worse. There was music again that night, on the edge of the camp, a viol, and a harp. The viol was Balin's, but the harp she had not heard. It lulled her to sleep it was so exquisite a sound, as did a deep, rumbling laugh from somewhere else.

In the morning Dwalin and Freyda were roused from watch so that they might rest up before the caravan got underway. They broke their fast together and shared agreeable words over berries, bacon and hot homemade grain cereal. Dwalin sprung to his feet when he saw Thorin at the side of his pony, saddling her, packing half a day's worth of food and utilities. "Time for me to ride," he told Freyda, with some regret in his tone.

"Give me a moment to saddle the nag. I'll be with ye," he entreated. "You had last watch. You ought to rest," Thorin said, firmly. "I will go with the shepherdess."

"Nay, my king. I shall ride with ye. No need for me to sleep. I am not a wee babe." "Dwalin," he interjected. "Rest. My friend."

He returned to what remained of breakfast on his plate, and Freyda remained ever cautiously at Dwalin's side, following the shift of his gaze toward the king and the shepherdess riding away. "You look as if there is something that worries ye, Mister Dwalin." "I fear for him when he goes off with her, the shepherdess, whatever her name is," he grumbled.

"He is a king, a leader, and she is a shepherdess as you may say. What a flock she's got too." Dwalin folded his arms stiffly. "It feels odd to me. I like it not," Dwalin confided, hesitantly.

"Oh it is not so odd, Mister Dwalin. I have heard his sense of direction is… well, more like a broken compass than not. They each have a duty. One fills where the other can't."

Unconvinced, Dwalin let his breakfast settle, begged a tankard of leftover mead from Bofur. "It could be good for him," Freyda suggested over Dwalin's ferocious trio of belches. "Good for him? What's good for him? A strange woman's company? Traipsing off alone with her, what good could come of it?"

Freyda smiled in the cheeky way she did, all the fierceness from her face at once lifted. "One never knows." Dwalin wrinkled his brow in her direction. "That is what I fear most."

"She is an honorable lady. No harm will come to him in her company." "No harm but what good?" Dwalin said skeptically.

Freyda did her little smile again, her two front teeth pressed at her upper lip. "One never knows."

V

They rode ahead to where the hill crested and looked down into the lush valley below. "The Trollshaws," she announced, wearily.

"Aye," he responded flatly. It was the first words that had been spoken between them since they had left camp, and she was nervous for it. Taking her off somewhere where he might rebuke her privately? The dignity of such a thing, she thought, wondering of some other purpose might have been within him, hoping that there might be, which was not for ill. He had taken her off here alone, where today scouting duty alongside her could have just as easily been passed to another.

'_Tis is a dangerous path, a fool's game, hope. Remember that, naked-jawed shepherdess, zesulal._

"You tell me there is a strangeness afoot in these lands," he said finally after another long silent stretch. Shallow woods of beech trees and heavy-rooted bushes greeted them just off the rutty path. They tethered the ponies and clamored through the groves in search of troll-prints, hidden caves or the scent of orc. They would smell the former long before they encountered them, and for now there was only a heavy, wet smell of earth after rain.

"Something is different now. I know little of what it is, but I feel it in the earth," she said, pensively.

"How so?"

"I don't think I can answer that so easily. It's difficult to explain."

"Then answer me this. Why did you come back to Ered Luin?"

She stopped; she could feel his gaze burning impatiently at her from behind, and brought up her resolve to look straightly into his eyes. "I willed that should I die, whenever I do, I will be stone again, not orc dung."

He gave her a slight, unamused half-smile. His head cocked at her. "As I have told you before, Meisar, I find you honorable. So I will give you another chance, and I expect a straighter answer than that. Why did you come back?"

"It is an instinct, an urge even, that I cannot explain. All I know is that the world is not as it was. It is darker and more dangerous. I feel it the earth and in the air." He narrowed his eyes at her, unsatisfied. Her heartbeat intensified. "And besides, even the lone souls amongst us wish to become part of the world again, part of one's own kind. That I think perhaps you understand."

"I am a king. It is not a question of want, but duty."

"You too chose exile my king."

"I chose nothing!" he shot back suddenly. She recoiled a bit. "No, I don't suppose you chose many things." Her eyes pointed down again, poignant regret coloring her face. "I am sorry. I should have had better sense than to speak of such things, to presume-"

He let out a long sigh, controlled, but rippled through with pain he could only so much conceal. "To answer your question…" he began pensively. "I asked nothing…" "_Khuzd tada bijebî âysîthi mud oshmâkhî dhi zurkur ughvashâhu," _Thorin recited quietly.

"A dwarf who takes a wife must guard her as his greatest treasure," Meisar repeated back in the Westron tongue.

"And the dwarf who has no wife must look upon his kin the same. I did not guard with my life the treasure that was the true one. And now it is gone. _They_ are gone. If I am of any purpose now, I will try and uphold that, for the sake of another. You asked me if I had some role to play in Brynja's and Bofur's union. There, it is."

"I am told of their courage, their pure and good natures. Your grief is unthinkable my king."

"And for what?" he lamented as he turned to face her again, for the first time a chasm opening in his burdened, regal countenance that allowed her to see but a shallow portion what lay just beneath that surface. "To lay in their tombs whilst their beards still grew. As good as nothing."

She felt it in her knees again, the sensation of water or some great force rushing around them, pulling her out into a dark, unseen depth. She thought of what Freyda had said about the thing that was done to her when Dwalin was afoot, and it was nearly enough to bring her to her knees. She took a step closer to Thorin out of her better consciousness, remembering other things Freyda had relayed to her earlier. "It is not for nothing," she admonished gently. "And you would know what of it?" he questioned again.

What should have drawn her far away was drawing her inexplicably closer. She came and stood cautiously beside him, less than arm's length apart. "When I returned to Ered Luin from the wilderness, they spoke of nothing except your quest. They told the tale of the dead dragon and the great battle the way they told tales of old. They longed for nothing more than to have their homeland again. And for your efforts, for your daring, we are going home. Do you see these dwarves you lead beside me? They are all returning to their home because you made it so they could."

"A fairy story my lady. One they will tell around fires and under mountains for ages to come. There's another part of all this that songs are not written for. The kind that are not sung in our halls, for they make mead taste of blood in your mouth."

He stood and turned around quickly to face her, took a heavy step toward her. She moved a step backward but she did not flinch, nor did her eyes lower. They were wide and unmoving. "Do you fear for me, Meisar, or do you fear me?"

"I do not fear you."

"You fear for me then?"

Hesitation rested behind the quiet steel of her eyes. "I fear that grief has wounded you ways that will never heal."

"Then you would be right."

_Hurmul,_ she thought, solidly, to herself, against his heavy gaze, which seemed somewhere else entirely, a darker place than this. _I will be. I will serve my king. For the Creator has endowed all things with purpose._

"If… if it were something in my power to do, I would lessen that burden for you my king."

"I thank you my lady." He nodded graciously toward her. How that face could have been imbued with such warmth had she deigned to show it. He let out a deep, uncanny grumble but what words he had meant to say caught in his throat and were dry.

"The water… it flows down from the Ettenmoors," she said finally. "Trolls stay close to the waters. The daylight turns them to stone, yet their sight is poor, and made worse by night. They are guided by the flow of the water and never wander far from it. They are hungriest and most active in the evening. But I think we shan't worry so much." "Why not?"

"For awhile there were none. The roads were safe, even the mountains. Slowly they've been coming back, attacking caravans, going after the farmers and wild men and the lone folk of the wild alike."

"And yet you say we should not worry for trolls?" "Not trolls, milord, orcs. The trolls though, the trolls… It is as if they are running from something themselves." She pushed aside a heavy low-hanging branch to a clearing. In its center stood three stone figures, trolls turned to daylight with the shock of it still written plainly in their expressions.

"We were here once," he said. "These trolls nearly had us for supper, if not for the wizard striking them down at the dawn."

He squinted upward at the frozen faces of the three, stupid with surprise. "William on the left, Bert there, and Tom," said Meisar. "I did not know such pitiful creatures had names." Meisar smiled in the serene way that she did sometimes. "There is much the races of Arda do not know, of kinds other than their own. These trolls, for example, are triplets. A rarity, and considered a lucky draw for the mother troll."

"There are females?" Thorin grumbled, disgusted.

"Yes. Like dwarves, a minor population. These lived in a cave nearby with their mother. But they squabbled so violently, she threw them out. Day after day they brought treasures to her, stolen from where I cannot imagine, trying to bribe her to let them come home." Her face morphed from moderately amused to settling into a sad, wistful stare. "After they turned to stone, she came about them and wailed each night, curled up at their feet, trying to coax them back to life in her grief. I suppose all mothers are the same in that way…"

_Yes, yes they are. My sweet sister._ He bit his lip.

She pushed back the thick undergrowth on the forest floor with her sword. "She died," Meisar concluded flatly. A troll skull was lain across Bert's foot. She poked it tenderly with the sheathed tip of her sword.

"Did you spend all your time in the wilderness watching beasts go about their foul business?" She could feel the dark look he was giving her on the back of her neck. It made the hairs stand up, on edge.

"Yes, and for it, I may keep my charges safe from their mischief. I settled close to here once and came to know the dramatics of these three quite well." When she finally dared look at him, he was seated on a rock, staring emptily into the undergrowth, at the pale dome of the mother-troll's skull. A hitching, hiccupping sound came once from him and then there was a thick, tense silence. "My king? Are you alright?"

He didn't answer. Her hand clasped and unclasped, fingernails digging into her palm. The urge came again, inexplicable, and pure. The kind, protective heart that had raised up the dwarves of Erebor along with his nephews, wherever it lay, was still alive. She felt the aura of it, invisible but weighty, so heavy now she could no longer bear it.

Her shadow moved on the ground just before him, and he felt the uneasy weight of her hand rest against his shoulder. She had such small hands, but the gravity of her touch was iron. Touch was the comfort he craved. A woman's touch, so foreign to him, ever absent the affection for another. How this comforted him so inexplicably and yet… how he wanted to be a dwarfling again, seeking peace, and safety in the arms of another. Innocent and unblemished, a creature death had not touched, not yet. Before the Arkenstone was uncovered, before the madness of Thror, before the dragon, before Fili and Kili. A babe, swaddled in furs, his chubby fists adored in sapphires, never noticing the bad eye of his father's, only the love in the unharmed one. _The memories of dwarves were long, so very long. _Staggering with Frerin to the top of endless piles of gold, blissfully ignorant the hold they had already taken on his grandfather, waving the toy swords, gifts from the King of Dale, who showered them in presents when he came to Erebor, just like the Masters of Laketown, and the Elvenking of the Woodland Realm. The black-headed Princess Dis, presented in swaddling clothes studded in diamonds, how they had fidgeted at her presentation to the Realm and Balin, his hair only gray in those days, had scolded them but slipped them sweets as he did so.

Had he not remembered the Elvenking scolding Thror on the mezzanine? How the fire-drakes from the north were growing bolder, he said. What they coveted, what the beasts would kill for. Yes, he remembered. His grandfather had taken to his chambers in a huff, and Elvenking left without saying farewell to the royal children. It was the last time he saw him before the dragon's wrath.

Had he not remembered his mother, sick in childbed and dead a week later, far from Princess Dis, fawned upon by all in the Realm? No, not then. Only Thrain weeping at her tomb for weeks.

He remembered Bilbo, the pale terror that turned to despair in his face.

There had never been innocence. There had never been peace. _They _were pure and good but _they _were gone. The only pure thing was her hand, rested on his shoulder. A woman, a beardless dwarrowdam lowborn as a coal miner in the Blue Mountains, and queerer still, a lone dwarf, a wildling. The shepherdess squirmed and he gripped her hand harder against his shoulder. His palm was callused, rough against her skin, as were the fingertips that tightened around her.

"Majesty?" Her voice was high and shaking.

Without a sound in response, he peeled her hand crisply back from him.

"Let us be on our way, _dunininh_," he said brusquely. Her lips moved to say something but no sound came out.


	10. AZANARUKÂR

**A/N: **AZANARUKÂR- The Reaches of the Imminent Shadow

They emerged bramble-crusted and messy-headed from the thicket of forest when it was nearing the setting of the day. The low evening sun came down upon a rocky outcropping just beyond the edge of the beech grove, sitting above a steep bowing decline into the valley below. Far on the other side, a bare hill crested jaggedly. Meisar squinted as a black fleck moved closer from over it. A raven. It circled above them, its flight lowering and circling, a little more each time, until it came down finally and landed squarely on the saddle of Jenny the pony. The nag tried to shake it off. "See what it wants," Thorin ordered her, his voice definitively sullen.

Delicately, she unpinned the scroll from the raven's foot. "It is from Lord Elrond of Rivendell. He bids you welcome in the Last Homely House."

Thorin pulled a dour face. "I have no business with elves."

"No business, but some respite. We could use it, my king."

"I wish not to waste our time commiserating with elves. We will continue toward the mountains without further delay."

"Perhaps it could be for some other purpose that he summons you? You have no doubt piqued some curiosity across this land since you have… come back." His hard face was unmoving. "My king, it is my duty to this company only. A bit of food and a comfortable rest is in all our best interests. We would only linger but a night."

"Lord Elrond's curiosity may be allayed at a later date."

"Very well. Then you may take your dwarves onward and if it pleases you, we will meet again at the High Pass." "No!" he barked suddenly. His arms were crossed and in them, his fingers curled against his palms to make stubborn fists. It made her jump back. "No," he repeated. "I do not wish to leave you- our companies will better together." He fumbled over his words and expressed himself further with a harsh exhalation through his nostrils. She could see the peaks of his cheekbones flush over the cropped veil of his beard.

She swallowed hard and bowed her head to him, with purposeful grace. "Rivendell it is," she concluded, too low for him to hear.

II

In the mid-night hours she woke. The wolf-pelt mantle she had used as a pillow was damp with her own sweat, her cheek cold and clammy against it. She had been dreaming, but as always, could never be sure of what. It was always fire, fire and a blackness that never seemed to lift.

Away from her, breath sucked in and made a high whinnying sound. She could hear the distinct sound of mail and weaponry clanking and thumping against the earth as he rolled. He never undressed, even for sleep. She propped herself up on her left arm to strain her eyes through the dark at him. There were shadows in his eyes, dark ones, haunted ones, but he was not awake. His eyes squeezed closed again and he gnashed his teeth, roughly. "Thorin…" her voice whispered hoarsely across the sleeping row of dwarves between them. He didn't answer. She dared not repeat herself any louder. The 'Ri brothers were the lightest of sleepers, Dori the fusspot and Nori the scoundrel the worst two. Ori was the baby and slept like it, a small fortune in an otherwise incommodious night.

Thorin rolled over again and made a wounded sound into his bedroll. As his hand grasped at his sword and nearly unsheathed it in his unconsciousness, Meisar moved herself swiftly and quietly out of her bedroll, hunched close by the embers of the fire and kept watch for a few moments more over him. _Hurmul. _She had sworn it by him, to protect him even from himself, though she had not told him _that._

The other dwarves were all sleeping. Gimli and his mother both snored louder together than Bombur's children, both supine and weirdly elegant even in sleep so their beards would not muss in the dirt. Their snores were a serene rhythm for this otherwise troubled night-music.

In the dark, a pair of feet shuffled heavily near her. The sound of creaking bones followed, the "bump" of a body coming to sit. She shied away from the barely-present glow of the embers.

"Meisar…"

"Mister Balin." She dipped her head to the old dwarf who had come to sit, creased with worry, by the near-dead fire. "How long have you been awake?" he asked grimly.

"He woke me," she said flatly. Thorin rolled over again and drew a ragged breath. She flinched when Balin drew nearer to her, his hands clasped palm to palm. They sat close in the tight circle of light made by the glow of the embers.

"_Murûd_," she whispered heavily.

.

"Yes… yes, _ghosts_. So very many of them I'm afraid."

"Are all of his years anything but tragedy?" she questioned, earnestly, but with purposeful curiosity. He had begun to intrigue her too much. She shivered as Balin leaned in closer to her, remembering the tightness of Thorin's hand, the need in his grasp. She should have known the answer then.

"Thorin is capable of enduring more than you could ever imagine, my lady. He was brought up to lead, to rule, under whatever terrible circumstance would befall us. And long before the dragon, he took up many a burden."

"Don't all kings?"

"If they are good kings. Alas, all are imperfect. Thorin not the least of them. There is still good in him. Surely you see it my lady?" She nodded, tacitly. She hadn't the words or fortitude to tell Balin what she had come to see in him, whether he desired her to see it or not. "I see it," she murmured.

"Good, good. Yes, though he frightens me now more than ever, I know his heart. How much I though I do not. There is a gap to fill in, but he will in due time I suppose, confide it to me."

Balin looked to her tongue-tied and awkward. "Ah, my lady… Meisar, he has spent some time with you, privately, for purposes I am quite sure are official business." He chuckled lightly but it did not seem to ease her. So he sighed and went on. "If he said… if he told… anything…" He trailed off and it seemed to become, fuzzily, a question.

"He said… he couldn't protect them."

Balin tried to hide his surprise from her but he was not very good at it. The kind old dwarrow, so forthright. She gave him a reassuring half-smile. "He protected Frerin from the troubles of Thror, as he protected Fili and Kili from the woes that come with a life in exile. The truth is, he protected them all of their lives, and would have done so with his own life forfeit, my lady."

He rested his chin quietly upon his hands, between the opposing forks of his great white beard. "Death claims all in the end. And we dwarves know very well it comes, far too often, at the most inopportune of moments." He shook his head, as if trying to loosen a stubborn, ugly memory. "He could not have saved them when it came for them. It was not the gold lust but the reclaiming of the mountain itself that drew the armies of darkness."

"Do you think he will ever believe that?"

"No," Balin answered flatly. "But he will live again. He will go on." She drew an unsteady breath. "How does that toe heel, Mister Balin?"

"Oh, fine enough. I can still ride, walk. I am growing old but it takes more than that to keep me down. And for the fortune of meeting your lovely company here upon the road, we have the services of two healers. I have a better-cared for toe than the rest of my body has known in years."

He managed to draw a serene smile from her. "You are hardy, Balin, in body and in mind. I would hope, most sincerely, that the king is as well. Though I fear he is not." The serenity of her face returned to its weary expression quickly enough. "You care for his soundness," Balin smiled, avoiding the obvious question. "That is good. It is noble, honorable." She pursed her lips, uneasily. "Is that a question, Balin?"

"Well, now that you ask I suppose it is," Balin chuckled. "Do you ask me that as your brother did? He likes and trusts me not, I know as much," she confided, self-deprecatingly.

"He likes to believe that he is the only one Thorin can trust. That he is very possessive over." Balin laughed easily. "There must be something about you, my lady that Thorin finds of trustworthy quality. Whether my brother likes it or not, to have Thorin's confidence is a rare gift."

She thought on it briefly and sighed. "I am mostly friendless in this world, and safe to keep his confidence."

"You are not friendless," Balin smiled. His wizened face was comforting; it had a warmth to it his brother lacked. "He does… appear to the observing eye, to… take some… oh shall I say, comfort in your company."

_What did he see in her, if he saw _something_ at all? _Her face was a mystery that he could not read, taciturn and weary, but kind somehow, kind and uncannily curious. She was no comely spring maid but a short, stout, rather unpolished lady around her middle years, not entirely ugly even to a dwarvish eye, with the robust femininity of her form ill-concealed, layered in no more than her tunic for night, the heavy, bowing bosom unbound beneath it. Balin glanced sidelong for a longer than polite moment at the pattern of her braid, the color of the fire that it was.

_Surely it was not that,_ the old dwarf reasoned stolidly. In nearly two centuries, there had never been. Balin reached out and patted her hand tentatively. Even through the thick wool of the fingerless gloves he donned, she could feel his hand was heavy and callused, but it was not like Thorin's. Its weight did not settle on her, weaken her and strengthen her together, the way his had, aggrievedly as he had sought her. "If he seeks some comfort in you, give it, as best you can manage."

"I am not used to giving such. What could he possibly ask of someone like myself?"

Thorin settled, quieted into a series of low, gravelly snores and after a few moments, was quiet entirely. Balin's tension seemed to lift, his shoulders a bit less stooped. "That I do not know. Yet. But I am quite certain my lady, that you are capable of giving more than you know. It could have just… it could have merely been a matter of the right person coming along to show you it."


	11. INFERNO

Thorin awoke early the next morning and aching. Deep grooves pained his palms and his hair was a fine mess. He crawled out of his sleep-sack, his body tender all over. The base of his spine throbbed, as if it had been resting all the night on a jagged rock.

The dwarves were breaking their fast already around a cook-fire. Urdlaug had exchanged a case of silverware for a pair of hams, eggs and a round of cheese the size of a wagon wheel, from passing merchants, the previous day, and the day's first meal smelled divinely heavy. She was already shouting orders at her sisters to help with the dishing out to the hungry company.

Oin stepped into his path obstinately. "For you, majesty." He thrust one of his bottled remedies into his hand. It was a milky substance tinted green, too green for any dwarf's liking, and it smelled even more peculiar. "What is this?"

"For sleep," Oin said loudly, passing him an unpalatable-looking potion. "For peace of mind both day and night," he continued, louder still. Thorin looked around edgily. "As your faithful subject, brother-in-arms, and healer, it is my duty to see-"

He uncorked it and gulped it down and nearby retched, while Oin put up his hands in disapproval. "You take it before you bed down, Thorin. Now, I think you are in a long day, if you make it to high noon."

"Near deaf he is. Don't need to be nobody's business," grumbled Dwalin. Out of earshot and hunkered down over a plate of hard bread smothered in runny eggs, ham and smoky cheese, he sat between Freyda and his brother, edgily. He had taken to accepting Freyda's company when breaking his fast the days past, which seemed to lighten her, except that he rarely spoke to her at all. Sometimes his lips moved as if to say something but all that came out was a grunt or more oft, a belch.

"It is all of our business whether he likes it or not," Freyda put forth finally, and boldly. "The worse things'll always stay inside. Dwarves like him always keep it locked away. 'Less he breaks and spills 'em like ye just tossed me mornin' potion!" Her voice rose to a deep squawk as Dwalin grabbed her bitter black coffee instead of his mead, took one sip and chucked it cup and all over his shoulder. "Southron swill."

"My Southron Swill! I like it!" She gave him a playful jab at the top of his arm. Dwalin stopped chewing halfway through another bite, the hint of a smile that had begun to form at the contact receding back into a contemplative surliness. "And what if he does? What if he does?" Dwalin put forth, hiding his unease at what the answer might be.

"He's got _someone_ to confide it in, if I'm not mistaken." Her pale brows raised. "Well, what do you suppose they talk about when they're off together? The weather?" The brows wiggled again, this time a bit more serious in intent.

"Yer daft, the both of ye." Dwalin dismissed both Freyda and his brother's agreeable motions with a wave of his hand.

Balin steepled his fingers thoughtfully. It had not been his place to say, but it felt more and more to him like it might be after all. "It may be that he has grown fond of the lady's company. I doubt it is any more than that. After all, it is not an… opportune time, brother, with all that has been and all that will be."

He summoned Thorin to their cook-fire gathering with a jerk of his head. He squirmed impetuously against Oin's prodding and meddling. Eda was eavesdropping on the other side of the apothecary wagon. That much he knew, and not even the hawing of the Ibexes could hide that Siv had joined her now too. His head began to feel a bit groggy.

"Let me see your hand," tut-tutted Oin. Thorin opened his palm and Oin raised a pair of bushy gray brows at the mean-looking gouges. One of them was bleeding. "To prevent infection," Oin lectured with the practiced patience of a healer, applying a paste to his hand that first stung then settled into a pleasant tingle. "Now leave it be. I'll dress it again in the morning." He rifled absent-mindedly through his medicine kits for the bandages, as Thorin winced impatiently. He wrapped linen over the hand. "Be quick about it," Thorin grumbled. "I should like to tend my hair before it is in mats." Oin squinted over at Brynja and Bofur, doing precisely that for each other, her gentle laughter, and Gimli's childish grumbling as Emli fixed the plaits at his beard nearby. The healer parted his lips to say something but thought better of it.

He fell asleep in the saddle sometime after they had gotten on with their travels, and woke again in the dark, covered in a blanket in the back of Donbur and his sisters' wagon. He saw a flash of flame-red, a hushed female presence around him. He muttered _her _name half-awake. She did not answer though, and soon it was little tawny-headed Anbur that tugged the blanket up around his shoulders though. "It is alright, your majesty." The dwarfling's voice was tender, but sad.

II

He rose after night had fallen. Dwalin sat alone by the remains of the cook-fire as if he had been waiting for him. "Ye need to sleep. Ye fell from your pony," Dwalin admonished quietly though. "I am fine. I do not wish to sleep."

"Oin give ye some of that poppy grog?"

"If that is what it was, I shall not be imbibing of it again. Not that I would." He took up his sword and his ax and stalked off, annoyed.

"Where are you going?" Dwalin called after him.

"My watch."

He went off against Dwalin's grumbling, his head still feeling irritably afloat. The land before him rose in a gentle wave of earth and sloped down again. He found his way easily enough in the dark, with the light of a single torch. The night had never seemed more unkind than here in the wilds. They were on the borders of the Trollshaws and the terrain was growing hillier.

When he reached the other side of the rise, he found not Gimli and Oin but Meisar, alone. "He got into the wrong patch of mushrooms. Belly's in knots. Oin's making him some potion," she explained with distaste. "I've taken their watch." Meisar made a welcoming gesture beside her and Thorin sat. She smoked a long-stemmed pipe. It was a quaint instrument, and whatever she smoked from it smelled like burnt strawberries. "Pipe-weed from Frogmorton," she offered. "It has a relaxing effect and helps with sleep." She handed him the pipe gently.

"Do not think I have not seen your own troubled sleep, my lady," he muttered, defensively. "You watch me sleep?" she remarked, unsmiling though. Her face set itself stonily again. "It is better than that bitter milk Oin gives you."

"I shall not be needing it again, if it matters," he responded, coolly. He shined the torch in her direction, making her blink. Two dogs curled up lazily at her feet, the third in her lap, as always, and her hair was different. The double plaits had given way to a braided bun half the size of her head, another plait snaking down her back, folded in half with its end clasped at the nape of her neck, so that her hair came to the small of her back rather than halfway to her feet. Fly-away strands framed her cheeks and forehead and the end part of the braid was crooked. In the days of old it was a shame for a dwarf to have crooked braids, but hard times had made it of little consequence now. He thought of Bofur and Brynja and their messy plaits, what mattered, what didn't.

Brushed and braided twice or thrice daily, but always messed _somehow. _They were never apart, not even for a moment. It made a queer pang inside him to think, one he was greatly unfamiliar with. He settled beside her, his back against the hill, sword across his knee. He planted his ax in the grass between them. "I do not watch you sleep, _dunininh_. Only the night of the orcs."

"The orcs?" Her head swam trying to recall the chaos of that night. Already, it seemed alarmingly distant. "When you were struck in the head. Am I surprised you do not remember?" he reiterated flatly.

"I remember. I remember much, my king. Too much I think." "And?" His voice was tinged with some inquiry, as to what she was hopeless to identify. His eyes in wind-licked torchlight were demanding, and his long hair, simple as it was kept, was silk-smooth luxurious and dark as onyx. And his plaits, the ones that were rooted before his ears, were as always, strictly even, so perfectly symmetrical. The silver of his hair-beads gleamed regally.

There emerged a hint of fear and pain in her that he could not discern the source of. At once her gaze had seemed awkwardly transfixed but as contemplation returned to her expression, it was dark with trepidation. He eased a bit, his body inching its way a bit closer, until he was leaning against the handle of his ax. "I did not mean to imply anything about your… sleep. Only that, I…"

"Speak freely, _dunininh._ Meisar…"

She drew a short breath inward. "It is the wee hours, your watch has come and gone, and you are out here, with me, again," she observed quietly. It was a question, and now he was the one helpless to answer, at least in the words he was capable of speaking aloud. She eyed him uneasily, remembering the feel of his hand clutching hers to the solid expanse of his shoulder.

"I would rather some company than toss and turn about."

"I have not heard that about you."

_No soul lonelier than Meisar the Beardless_. He heard Donbur's voice in his head repeating it, even that cheerful lout unavoidably dour in his description of her. "You have not heard what about me?" He crossed his arms and eyed her stiffly.

"I have been told... that you are a secluded kind."

"Told? Believe not what you are told. Believe only what you see." "I see a dwarf who has suffered over many deaths, including his own."

"What do you know about living? Or death for that matter?" he rumbled, defensively.

"I am a dwarrowdam of Dale. Do you think I do not know death?" she snarled back. All of the reverence, the quiet, disarming stoicism was ripped away, and there was a raw, trembling pain. She stood quickly and faced him; him sitting at a slight elevation above the ground, and her standing, she met his eyes relentlessly. He flinched away from the infernal indignity in her gaze. "When I tell you I remember, it is not to boast, my king. And I would give all that I did not."

"The inferno?" His voice was calmer and it brought her down several degrees in return. "Yes. The day the dragon destroyed Dale, and claimed Erebor. I could not have been more than a few years old."

"And you see it now? After all these years?"

She sat again. "I see fire. Only fire. And a little of what was before, but it is of no importance these days." She turned again to Thorin with a great sadness in her eyes. He did not like her eyes like that; they looked too much like his. They were heavy again. She looked like a carved effigy hovering over a tomb. "Tell me," he said more gently. "What did-"

She interjected, sharply but distantly. Her eyes were closed. "I remember the house with the terra cotta floor. High above the streets; we had a small apartment in a round tower. I lay on the floor of my home often in the heat of summer; it was cool to the touch. And my mother's feet with her great fat toes. She wore little rings on them. It is never her face I can remember, but her feet alone."

She opened her eyes. "On that day I remember the hot wind. It came through the windows and all through the little streets. I went to the marketplace with my mother and my brothers. I had two or three of them, I think, all much older. I was the beloved babe of this family. If only I could remember their faces. The last I saw my father he was telling us to be quick about our errands. There was a storm coming in from the north, he said, a strange storm. I remember the sky was gray like smoke over yonder."

Thorin sighed. "Crops and villages to the north were laid waste to. We thought it to be skirmishes among men, a pack of orcs at worst. The sentries were put on alert, but we had no idea what was coming until it was too late. By the time we called a full alarm, he had already circled the mountain from the north and turned back toward the gates of Dale."

"It happened so quickly. Before Smaug breathed his first on the city, it was so ordinary a day, except for the wind. I clung at my brother's leg and begged him for a coin in the marketplace. There were pretty painted horses on a perambulating thing that turned 'round."

His heart wretched in and tightened in his chest, but he urged her on.

"So he left me with my pony to ride around and around. Little human and dwarven children were all about. A dwarven lady with heart-shaped hair was selling toys. She was wearing the prettiest blue and gold gown, and her face is the last thing I remember of my life in Dale. She was selling trinkets, and kites for the children. And then she looked up and screamed as they all blew away. But they didn't… rise up in the air like birds. They turned black and fell as ash."

She smiled bitterly at the memory._ Dead_ Thorin concluded, silently. _Just as my kin most beloved_. Long ago he had concluded that none could understand his pain, not even those who had suffered similarly. In Meisar's pained smile he saw his own, the one had once comforted Fili and Kili with, forced for sure, but done not out of falsehood but love…

His arms ached and his fingers twitched but he could not give her that comfort. "And the inferno? How did you survive?" He took her pipe up for the first time and smoked heartily. The smoke carried on a light wind and made a burning sensation in her eyes that produced tears. "Meisar…" he said gently. She could not read his face through the blur of salty liquid quenching her smoky eyes.

_A Firebeard lass_, she reminded herself intensely, staring at the orange plait whose end was coiled messily on her lap. She dared not look in his eyes for fear of what she might see, now. "And then… and then, there was the shadow, a great shadow, and then the roar, and the blast of the horns. I ran where the people were running, crying for my brothers, my mother. As you can expect, I never found them. But I saw a whole crowd buried by a falling tower. Three years old and knew not yet my mother's face but I have seen theirs in my dreams ever since. One never forgets the look on another's face just before they die, and know it is coming. I saw them in the rubble with their limbs crushed and blood coming out of their mouths, sputtering for help, and I could not… could do nothing."

_Just as he had seen the arrow in Fili's throat. He had not seen Kili die. Kili was already dead. Had he lain close to his brother when he breathed his last? Had they comforted each other somehow? Mahal, he had prayed. Grant them only that. And then he had slipped into unconsciousness, a blackness colored red, and would never know._

_And he would never ask. _"What did you do?" he asked instead, to the woman sitting stiffly beside him, her eyes somewhere else, while he was stifling the hitching of his breath, against that terrible moment, which felt like it was crushing against his ribcage.

_Or Thror. He had not seen the pale orc's sword slice through his grandfather's neck but when he tossed the head at his feet the expression of his final moment was frozen upon his face._

"_Do?_ What does anybody do? The fire-wind singed the clothes off of me and all but a few wisps of my hair, all of my beard if I ever had one. Had not tumbled down the steps of a root-cellar, I would have been singed away too. After that I ran into the wilderness with a thousand other people who were burned and naked and screaming, and I took the dress from a dead girl lying at the roadside."

_They had run. Some naked, some with the beards singed clean from their faces, which was as good as naked to a dwarf._

"I saw the mountain by night lit up and the sky was the color of blood. _Nargubraz_," she recalled mournfully. "When the sun went down for days after." _Red and more red._

"The dwarves that survived had signs carved with the names of their kin, holding them aloft, calling their names. The same names, for days and days, and after awhile, a little at a time, they went away. I couldn't even remember the names of my own, and anyway, it seemed my throat was so dry from thirst and smoke. Even this day I cannot remember, only my eldest brother. I think his name was Taras. A few leagues south of the mountain, the day after, the ground shook, and we thought the dragon was coming out of the mountain to finish us off. I was alone. Somebody picked me up and ran with me. I would have been trampled otherwise. It was a woman, a human. She left me when she saw that I was a dwarf, kicked me and swatted me and cursed me and all of kin for bringing the inferno. I suppose another dwarf took pity on me or I would have died there. I do not know. After that, for years and years, it is mostly a blur."

_The last time he saw Thrain he had been mad and rambling. Orc blood still staining his clothes from the battle, he left, without provisions, on a pony, into the night. They rode to the west and to the east in search of him, and he had rode day and night until saddle sores opened on his thighs and Dwalin and Balin had summoned him home in desperation and despair. Fundin was gone and Frerin, Dis sent south with kin to Dunland while they marched north to Moria, and he was alone. _

"You were no more a babe. How can you possibly remember?"

"The memories of dwarves are long. We remember because we are meant to. I am sure of it."

She wanted so much to reach out and place her hand over his. His pinky twitched, palm pressed flat against the rock, gripping over the edge of it with the other three fingers. But she could not, not again, not now.

There were so many things she had endeavored never to ask him. Alas, endeavoring, she found, had counted for little as of late. "And what, my king, do you see?"

"I saw a king on a hill, riding away."

She scowled the way he did when elves were the subject, but it was a dreamy, wistful kind of scowl. "Yes, yes. Platinum hair like the gems they coveted, their kind. Dwarves told me the covetousness and betrayals of Thingol and Thranduil alike since I was young, but I always thought that elves were strange and sort of beautiful. After the dragon, when we followed in the tracks of their armies, I was glad. I wanted to see one up close. I thought they would help us. After all, they weren't orcs or goblins. But at the forest, they shut the gates to us. On the borders of the Greenwood, many dwarves succumbed."

_He remembered. Remembered Thrain struggling to stand, weak from shellshock. Dwarves who sneaked into the Greenwood to forage never came out. Thror wandered aimlessly in the aftermath, helpless to soothe the wailing of one dwarf or another over their dead, far from their shelters of stone, a shovel or the strength to dig a grave rarer and rarer by the day. After a week or so, he stopped shielding Dis's eyes to the sight of carrion crows picking the flesh from the dead._

_As they moved south hugging the eastern borders of Mirkwood, he remembered Fundin trying to bribe one Elven guard then another. Dwalin and Balin carried their mother the whole way south when it failed. He remembered. He remembered the gold that was melted into her fingers, neck and wrists, where she had donned jewelry. An ear was singed half off, gold and useless flesh melded grotesquely together. Blistered and cracked, the old dwarrowdam cried in pain every time she moved. When she died in the East Bight weeks later, it was the only time he had ever seen Dwalin cry._

Had he seen her there, he wondered, among the throngs of dwarves that wandered in a state of confusion and shellshock southward from Erebor? He had been amongst them, his rich blue robes disintegrating on his body, the fur of his mantle matted, his feet blistering in his boots. He searched a reserve of grim memory for a dwarfling lass alone, her hair crisped away by dragon-fire but for a few orange wisps. Perhaps, but there had been so many of them they started to blend together, even the littlest of the dwarf-babes. He had seen far too many parched-lipped baby dwarves in their death rattles, in the arms of a mother already dead, to want to remember the faces of any of them.

Somebody had cared for her, or how would she have survived? He reckoned it, assuredly as he was able to convince himself that some good still existed even in the dark times. _Dwarves take care of their own._

But not elves. A long-simmering hatred boiled in him momentarily, quelled over time, flaring like an ulcer in his belly now. A king had turned his back on a king, but on a child. How many of their kin had seen her begging for bread amongst the others? Looked into her eyes (_were they so piercing, so heavy then?) _and turned away from her?

"They are no friends of dwarves and never will be. A dwarf's honor is in the oaths he swears, the friendships he forges. They are like iron. Elves will never honor such a concept." He countenance darkened dramatically.

The wistfulness floated away from Meisar's expression and she was the grave effigy again. "I will not press you on such matters, if it is troublesome to you, my king. I only ever meant to tell you… that I am sorry for the ones you lost. Even worse is that you can remember the many of them, something I cannot say for myself." His lips twitched indefinitely. "Save your sympathies for the living, my lady."

"I protected your life with my own, my king. Not because you are dead, but because you live."

He purposefully ignored her. "I will not imply that you are ignorant the sufferings of our people. I know that you are not, and for your kin I too grieve."

He sighed again, easing his mouth away from her pipe. "I am afraid I have smoked away all but another breath of it," he apologized. His head, in spite of all the memories that had bottlenecked in his psyche, one after the next in chaos, flooding back, were gone suddenly, like a tide washed out to sea before a catastrophic wall of water rushed back into shore. But it never came. He was filled, in that moment, with more peace than he had known in some time. Inexplicable, it washed over him more like a warm bath.

She imbibed the last, let her lips linger on its tip a long, hesitant moment, and gazed out onto the horizon through the thin chain of smoke. The sun was coming up and it was blood orange.


	12. KHURÂL (THE BRIDGE MAKER)

"When did you sleep last?" Thorin asked her gruffly as she rubbed a heavy haze from her eyes.

The horizon glared a warning at her. "The red sun I do not like the look of." "Woman, do you avoid every question so purposefully?" His entire faced seemed to furrow impatiently at her.

"If half this night has night has been any indication my king… no. I do not." His own eyes, heavy from sleep, drifted closed for a long moment. Remembering everything. Fire and chaos and death. Kings with hair of pale gold, faces and hearts like ice.

In the wilderness, they were the same. A king and an orphaned babe begged for sustenance. A king and this solemn woman cried out in their sleep for those who were no longer there. He knew it now, and it scared him, but he could never let her see. _A black pony with gilded reins. Taras. _Not Dis's governess or a sentry after all. Not even Dis's, or his, at all. Another ghost had invaded his subconscious kingdom of them. _Frerin, Taras_. Were they much different, he mused. At least he could remember Frerin's name, his face. Dark hair but a shade fairer than his own, a bushy, less-than-elegant beard that came to his collarbone, Thror's nose and brow. More than capable of childish anger, a bit of a smirk always on his lips, he had. Reminded him of Kili when he was in one of his impish moods.

_Wherever Fili and Kili were, at least they were together. _His larynx seemed to twist inside his throat. His voice muted as well as his thoughts, perhaps for the better. His hand curled and drew back before it placed itself on her shoulder.

Meisar's sleepless eyes blinked twice at him. "Rest," Thorin insisted. "I will lead them on." She shook her head vigorously. "I will be fine. Let us wake the company, and get on. Make haste."

He trailed her through the camp, as she shook sleeping dwarves awake. Nori rolled over and swatted at her sleepily and Thorin put the tip of his boot into his tailbone enough to rouse him. She stood aside and knocked gingerly at the wagon door of Brynja and Bofur, heaving and creaking on its wheels even at this hour. Their languid, sleepy laughter preceded a groan of acknowledgement and Meisar hurried away quickly.

"Find somewhere to sleep. We will halt at midday," Thorin repeated, impatient now. Meisar was in the midst of rousing Anbur, Yrsa and Lulia and helping them to pack up their bedrolls. "Come rest in our wagon!" Lulia offered. "We were about to go back to sleep in the wagon."

"Indeed. See that our shepherdess rests herself well," Thorin came down on his knee to the level of the two dwarf girls. "I put my faith in you two, to see that a good sleep is afforded her." "Yes your majesty!" Bombur's daughters all but dragged her back to their wagon. Their bedding was all laid down snug and tight to each other. They unrolled one for her and a blanket and pillow to go with it. "Lay down! Lay down Meisar _dunininh. _King's orders!"

The hounds whined impatiently and scratched at the floor of the wagon, and then her lap. "Please, I must go. There is _something_, trouble. I know it." "No!" insisted Anbur. "King's orders," added her younger sister smartly. "I'll take all the blame myself if he is unhappy. Now please I must go!"

Anbur, Yrsa and Lulia looked at each other as if considering her plea, and then, bursting into laughter, sprang forth and piled onto her at once, pinning her under the blanket. "King's orders! King's orders!" they squawked in unison. The wrapped the blanket under and around her, like flatbread rolled about cooked meat, trapping her limbs. Anbur plunked herself down smartly on her abdomen. The dwarfling was so very fat she squeezed of her breath altogether. "You cannot be serious," she grumbled, angrily. Anbur adjusted herself smugly. "I'll sit on you until you fall asleep!"

"Get off!" she thundered suddenly at the dwarflings but it only made them laugh harder. Yrsa scooted over and sat on her legs at the knee when she squirmed, pinning her efficiently. "Stop squirming or I'll call Donbur too!" Anbur clapped her hands and squealed. "Yes, yes, and he'll sit on your head if I tell him to! You know what happens when he eats too much cheese…"

"_Mahal's _sake, you don't want to kill her," Lulia reminded. "Or us."

The wagon rolled over the roughening terrain, jolting her about. They were headed East at least, the right direction. The dwarflings drifting away around her reminded her of an older time. A brief respite at Bombur's hearth in Ered Luin, the heavy scent of soup and bread omnipresent. Bombur's laugh after a long day, his wife Bira's sing-song voice, and their fourteen children piled around the hearth on winter nights. Snoring together, they made the very roof tremble. One more was one more, she remembered him saying, and always made sure she had bread at supper, and a spot to sleep. Bedded down close and tight, they were all so very fat. She had never been cold there, or hungry.

After a short spell of giggling and whispering and plumping their pillows, keeping their weight firmly upon Meisar's body, Anbur and Yrsa settled and fell quickly into the snores and grunts of their mid-morning nap, and when they were assuredly deep in slumber, she pried herself carefully from beneath them, slipped out of the wagon, and went to find Thorin.

II

"Blood has been spilled this night somewhere in these lands. I like it not."

Meisar's voice came in from behind. Thorin turned and she was studying the horizon eastward. He and Dwalin stood at the edge of the plateau, surveying the land ahead. It was flat to the East where it dipped sharply downward to accommodate the river valley, flat and dry around the thick waterway for leagues. The day was clear, the Misty Mountains sharply defined against the cerulean sky. "You should be resting, Meisar," he scolded her lightly.

"Worry not for me, milord," Meisar replied quietly. "Like a mule," Dwalin growled toward her. Thorin sensed the disinterest in Meisar's gaze toward him, easily four times her size in bulk if not height, and it seemed to faze her none. A twinge of admiration pooled in his chest, almost enough to wring a smile from his lips. But he refrained, seeing the impatience in Dwalin's face, and the dead seriousness in Meisar's.

"A superstition, lass," Dwalin snorted. "We will take extra precaution then. You need some sleep," Thorin decreed finally. "I would like to see what is west. If you would my king, lead the caravan on. I will ride out and meet you at sundown," Meisar offered, more in desperation than defiance.

"You may be the Shepherdess, but I am the king, and I tell you woman, go rest yourself." Meisar crossed her arms angrily and did not move. _Woman._ It made her head burn a bit. _Dunininh, _Shepherdess. Never woman. Her head bore a dull ache but in the heat of battle, what warrior complained? Yea, though she was no warrior hardened like him by battle after battle, defiance rose in her chest as stubborn as Thorin Oakenshield himself.

"I will have Eda slip you a potion that will make you sleep until we're clear the mountains!" he thumped at last. Meisar's lips pursed at him, annoyed and defiant. Was this Thorin Oakenshield's idea of a challenge?

"Eda knows better than to try. Advise Oin also my king, that it would be unwise to try." She had been so quiet and stoic always, so reverent in her own way. It was a departure however subtle the expression on her face as she uttered it. Finally she let her eyes catch his, the fire of his own burning a hole in hers.

"Another five leagues and there is a bridge. We should make for that and cross there. To Rivendell then there will be a simple path."

"Rivendell?" hooted Dwalin in alarm. Meisar's eyes darted quickly between the two dwarves. "The king has been summoned to the Last Homely House. Lord Elrond wishes to commiserate," Meisar informed him flatly.

"I am summoned by no elf!" thumped Dwalin. "We should cross the water ahead," Thorin interjected, eager to change the subject. "The water is at a shallows. Never mind the bridge."

"If we cross here, the road is unreliable for miles. We could very well be stuck in ruts deep enough to strand the wagons. And none to aid us. We are deep in the wilds."

Dwalin ignored her purposely. "What shall we do, my king?"

"I ask you humbly, my liege, to put your trust in me on this matter." Meisar lowered her head to him, humbly, but with definite urgency.

He scowled tiredly. "What are my people to think when you lead them along the road, and I do not, as their king?"

She bristled. "It's not a secret that your sense of direction is hardly regal."

"And who are you, exactly?" Thorin growled at her, defensively. The left side of Dwalin's lip curled up smartly in a smirk. Meisar recoiled a bit. "I am nobody, my king." She stuck her chin up to him, obstinately, the way he had once done to the Goblin King who said the same to him, choking back the dark bile of wounded pride with an unwavering silence. He sighed, running his hands through his hair. "I did not mean it like that," he muttered, and the smugness at once was gone again from Dwalin's face.

Meisar smiled then in her serene and melancholy way. "You are welcome to lead your people any way that you choose. I… I am only a simple woman who knows my way home." He sighed resignedly in her direction. Her quiet, earnest reverence disarmed him. The dogs were circling at her feet impatiently, sniffing at the Eastward-bound wind.

"I defer to you, my king, and to my vow, that I shall serve you well and protect you." She curtsied and departed quickly. Jenny had been following dutifully behind the wagons. She caught and bridled her quickly. The pony nickered at the bit irritably and as exhausted. "Come now lass. We will not be long," she assured the unhappy nag. Jenny seemed to disagree but turned smoothly, riding off westward down the beaten path.

III

"Where has she gone?" Thorin demanded of the gathered dwarves.

"Told her to come back, in the name of the king we did," swore Yrsa. "Told 'er Donbur would come sit on her if she didn't," added Anbur. Thorin smiled amusedly at the two, patted their heads. "You have done your duty admirably then." "Disobeys a direct order from a king," seethed Dwalin. "Let her be," said Thorin. "Let her be."

On her pony beside him, Freyda leaned to whisper something to Dwalin, and afterward he said no more. Thorin craned his neck back toward the horizon and could see a solitary fleck moving toward them. A black pony; his eyes were still sharp. The tenseness that had gathered in his chest eased a bit. "Coming back I see," remarked Freyda. "Nothing to fear then I suppose." The closer she got the quicker she seemed to move.

Thorin's pony reeled suddenly. The caterwauls of the hounds became more urgent and Meisar's pony flew back toward the caravan at breakneck speed.

"Highwaymen?!" Dwalin bellowed through the air to her.

"No. Orcs! Heels to the flanks, all of you!"

Panic spread through the caravan behind them as the draft animals brayed and stomped and reeled against the panicked cries of the dwarves. "Move!" Thorin roared. He tore along the flank of the caravan, slapping the hindquarters of the fear-frozen animals so that they bolted forth along the road. The contents of wagons jostled, a violent clanging of pots and pans in Urdlaug's wagon as the two great aurochs lurched and raced forth. The dwarves grabbed weapons, axes, swords, crossbows and a mounted windlance atop the wagon of Emli and Gimli.

"We have five to six leagues on them but they've caught our scent. We must move, quickly! We make for the bridge!" Meisar waved frantically to the south.

"It will do us no good! They'll cross behind us at speed!" Dwalin thundered. Their ponies nearly spooked beneath them, crowded together as they were. "Do you want to take a chance stranded in the shallows?"

Dwalin's mouth moved but made no sound. Meisar turned her pony and rode along the caravan, shouting orders to move southward toward the bridge.

"My king! My king!" the dwarves were shouting. "Do as she says!" he thundered back, following at speed.

A quick nod of gratitude in the chaos she gave, and Meisar was shouting then back at Hegi in Khuzdul. The wild-eyed dwarrowdam smiled beneath her heavy silver-streaked beard as only a woman of her bearing could do in such a situation. She pushed Bifur to the reins of her wagon and went to work in the back.

They were still out of sight when the arrows began to rain down. The first whistled through the air, missing Thorin's neck by inches. It was deflected on Dwalin's axe before it landed in Meisar's.

The harsh "twang" on the windlance preceded an arrow taking out one of the wargs. Emli at its helm, the felled orc staggered to its feet and fired at her wagon, missing Gimli by a hair's breadth. A quick-speed rain of one arrow after another took out two more. An orc's arrow grazed her arm, staining her white traveling cloak in blood but she kept firing. _No wrath like a mother-dwarf's. Mahal's mercy be upon those in its sight. _

Only two were aback wargs now, the rest on foot. It mattered not. They were gaining too quickly. Snapping jaws cut through the air and whipped at the dwarves a league away. "There it is! Go, quickly!" Thorin brought up the rear, urging them on ahead toward the bridge. The pack was in sight and bearing down as the wagons and ponies went thundering over the narrow bridge. Below it the water was churning, sloshing wildly around the rocks whose peaks dotted the water-scape.

Hegi halted the wagon on the other side of the bridge. The dwarves were screaming "come! Come Hegi!" but she just looked back and laughed manically. Suddenly she flung a flaming sack which landed with a thud on the bridge. Hegi lit a match on the axe in Bifur's head.

. As the sack landed in front of him and the flaming torch followed, Moses the llama stalled on the bridge and reared. Bombur's youngest children grabbed their provisions off his back and ran, but Anbur wouldn't leave the wretched beast. She held the reins tightly but was thrashed about, knocked to the ground. The dwarves were calling frantically for her now, Hegi the loudest and fiercest of them. "The sack," she screamed in Khuzdul. "Get away from the sack!"

The flames sampled it mildly for a moment, before it exploded, and into the river went Anbur.

The llama skittered across the bridge and without Anbur. Her sisters and Donbur began frantically shouting for her, and just as suddenly, Meisar was tossing aside her fur mantle and and rushing toward the furious waters as the arrows of the orcs grew closer and more frequent. "Carry on!" Meisar bellowed. "Use your sword where it's needed! I have her!"

She waded as furiously as one could wade into the waters, until they became too strong to bear, and she stumbled up onto the rocks, jumping from one to another until she reached Anbur, caught precariously between two of them. White water rushed around the girl as she clung to the rock, sobbing as cold, erratic whitewater slapped at her face and caught in her nose. It took Dwalin and all three of the 'Ri brothers to hold Donbur back from going in himself. He screamed her name in pure terror until Dwalin put a fist in his chest in desperation, and knocked him to the ground briefly enough to get a good hold on him. Meisar pried Anbur from the currents running between the rocks and the girl was safely in her arms. Not much shorter in stature than herself, she struggled to hold her arms all the way around her girth. Meisar staggered up onto the rocks, gripping her, struggling to maintain her own balance on the slippery surface. Knees buckling, she was screaming until she was hoarse "burn it! Burn it! Burn it!" The bridge was burning too slowly and the orcs were close.

Hegi grabbed three sacks and poured them all out methodically into a great pile in the middle of the bridge unbothered by the flames that licked about her and the closeness of the orcs. Arrows began to rain about her but she dodged them skillfully. She was laughing wickedly as Bifur waved his arms across the bridge frantically, shouting inaudibly in Khuzdul to her. She cursed back at him and kept on her work. Finally he dashed onto the bridge and picked her up around the waist, carrying her off as she screamed and cursed at him. Bifur was the last off the flaming bridge with Hegi kicking and fighting in his arms. The dwarrowdam freed herself, kicked him once in the knees, and drove a fist into his gut. She dipped the arrow tips of her three-pronged bow (made entirely of bones no less) into a foul grease and unleashed them onto the powdered concoction she had dumped on the center of the bridge. It exploded in a blinding white light, throwing crossing orcs in flames. The fire consumed the rear of the pack still on the other side, sending them into the river only to be carried away immediately by the powerful current. Otherwise they fell in flames where they stood.

Thorin turned back to the river just as Meisar slipped head over heels into the rushing waters dodging a rain of shrapnel and flame.

Donbur went shouting into the frothing water for his sister, only to be pulled back by Thorin. "Follow the stream!" he roared at Donbur, and the two of them took off running, shouting for the rest of the company to carry on and not look back. They did, for sheer lack of daring to defy him, except for Bombur's children, who took off down the river after them, but were soon exhausted and could not keep up, huffing and puffing, at last collapsing to the ground in a sobbing pile. Urdlaug, Yrsa, Virta and Lulia hugged at the ground, calling _Mahal's_ name into the unresponsive earth. "By my beard, take me if you take her! Let an orc arrow pierce my heart!" wailed Urdlaug. Yrsa flung herself atop her sister's massive, curled frame and cried. "Thorin will save her. He is strong! He is our king!" Urdlaug all but flung her off. "She's gone! She's gone! And so is Meisar the shepherdess. Dead, dead, our king too perchance. Now what shall we do? Where is our hope now?"

IV

Meisar was growing cold and weak though her arms clamped doggedly around Anbur's waist pushing her head above the water. After awhile she stopped struggling against the icy current, all her limbs peacefully numb, a submarine darkness closing in about her.

When she awoke again a hard voice was calling for her at the shore.

"Meisar!" "Anbur!" Thorin swooped in on his knees to the wet bundle thrown up along the sandy riverbank. She was alive, freezing and disoriented, her body shaking in violent coughs expelling drabbles of water from her lungs when Thorin lifted her and turned her over. Anbur spilled from her arms and cloak, the girl also alive and crying as she put her arms up toward Donbur.

"Take her to Eda! Fetch Oin! Do it now!" Thorin tore off his cloak and wrapped Anbur in it, thrust her into Donbur's arms. "Go!"

"What about Meisar!"

"I have her!" Thorin's eyes lit up with a ferocity that dared Donbur to remain another second where he stood. Donbur thundered off, clutching his sister tight in his arms.

When he was gone, Thorin looked down at Meisar, shaking, soaked to the skin, freezing to the touch. He tore through the cloak and doublet, pulled off the bracers, her over-skirt and tunic, and tossed them aside on the riverbank. It was an admiration he endured silently, even when peeling away the layers of soaked clothing. Meisar's copious tresses were half-unbraided and mangled, strewn over and clinging to all the more curious parts of her; Thorin, for his part, vowed to remain virtuous toward her. He surmised (perhaps correctly, though he was lucky not to find out) that Meisar would cut the jewels from any man or dwarf, even a king, who would think to do otherwise. He wrapped her shivering body in his overcoat, hauled to his feet with her in his arms.

He ran without threat of exhaustion, with inertia low and fiery and burning like the furnace of a forge.

The dwarves had halted half a league ahead, all screaming and shouting frantically amongst and at each other. Sobbing and crying, they exploded into a great caterwaul of relief when they heard his voice at the distance, all running forth to him. When they saw the feet sticking out of the bundle in Thorin's arms the dwarf women followed in haste and hysteria. Thorin bellowed for Eda and Oin.

Meisar rolled off the overcoat as Thorin set her down. He covered her quickly and barked orders at the dwarrowdams to keep her warm. Lest they catch the way his eye wandered to the supple curve of her bottom under a veil of sopping red hair. They wrapped her in blankets quickly. Dwalin's bellowing and the sound of his thrashing drew him quickly to his feet again, running to the other side of the caravan toward him.

"Virta! Virta, come and help me! Hold his arm!" He heard the healer shouting frantically before he saw what was at hand. Dwalin was laid supine on the bed of Bofur's wagon. His arm was dislocated at the shoulder, and there was a deep cut on his forearm. Eda, Bofur, Ori and Nori struggled against his strength. His face was red, veins on his neck roped and throbbing.

"Virta!" seethed Eda again. Virta backed away from the thrashing and snarling Dwalin. "Virta, you cannot back away at the sight of blood!" "It's not blood, it's a bone in the wrong place!"

"Yes, yes now come." "He's too big! He'll break my neck if he flails!" "Mahal help you I will be the one breaking your neck!" the old healer screeched back at her. Dwalin hissed through his teeth in pain.

Virta fled but Freyda came over soon enough, pushing past Thorin to pin Dwalin by his right arm. "Lass!?" he said through gritted teeth. "It is for the best, Mister Dwalin. Squeeze me hand hard as ye like! And hold still!" Eda nodded gratefully at Freyda and took Dwalin's arm again. He gritted his teeth and nodded half-agreeably.

"Mahal protect me," said Eda, and moved to set his shoulder back its socket.

Dwalin roared and Freyda's bare arm flexed, her muscles standing up, sinewy and raw with strength. Dwalin's roar eased into a dark hiss and through it another rattle of bones crunched.

"Ouuuaahhh!" It was Freyda howling now. Dwalin released her hand and she held up four fingers, all pointing in several different directions. Virta made a high pitched squeaking sound and stumbled over her own feet. "By Mahal, I will be the one breaking ye if you don't do as she says!"

Thorin caught Dwalin's opposite arm as he looked onto Freyda with an unfamiliar cloud of regret in his eyes. "Didn't mean that," he muttered quietly to Thorin as the pain dulled swiftly. Eda applied her herbal paste to the cut left by an orc arrow, wrapped in tight in linen bandages. Dwalin fell back, sweat pouring from his brow, and leaving dark stains along the neckline of his tunic, the fur he wore about his shoulder soaked in it to the touch. "Tell the lass… I'm sor… my regrets." Virta rolled a blanket to put behind Dwalin's neck. "Oin's seeing to her now. She'll be alright, Mister Dwalin." Dwalin's head rolled a bit toward Thorin. "The shepherdess? Meisar? Is she alright?"

He had never called her by name. _Woman._ Thorin's own voice caught in his head and it made him feel ashamed suddenly. "She is… alive." Dwalin groaned. "Go see to her, Thorin. I'll be fine." Thorin climbed out of the wagon bed. "I will give Freyda your… regrets."

V

.

Urdlaug's tear-stained face looked up long enough to utter a high squeak toward Thorin and come down before him on her knees, embracing his hand against her cheek. "Thank you thank you thank you," she wept again and again. He raised her by the first of her chins. "It is my honor."

He found Eda quickly and she smiled before he had a chance to speak a word. "She will be fine, my king, as long as she stays warm," Eda assured. She placed her hand on Thorin's forearm. "Without you she might not be. Nor the girl." She nodded tenderly to Anbur, cradled in her brother's cushiony lap, while Yrsa fed her hot stew from her spoon-hand

"May I see her?" Thorin asked impatiently. Eda nodded him into the small corner of the camp where was treating the injured.

No soft creature, this dwarrowdam; Thorin could see her scowling to herself into the fur of his coat, shamed at having been plucked defenseless from the waters.

"Have you taken my attire!? Thorin… your majesty!" Her voice thundered in much the same way his did. He ruddy face was redder than ever.

"You were soaked to the skin. The women are out laying the wash to dry." Meisar wiggled impetuously out from under Thorin's coat, only to find she was naked. Thorin was surprised to find her without shame at this fact- even if he had been the one to frantically strip and warm her at the riverside. "I left your small-clothes intact, if it is of any importance," he muttered without humor. He expected her to voice her embarrassment, or gratitude, perhaps both. Instead, without a word other than a heavy grunt, she thrust her arms through the sleeves of his great-coat, snatched up his belt and snapped it about her waist to keep the coat closed. Thorin watched her stride off barefoot toward the wash. The dwarrowdams were doing a round of wash not far from the river, drying garments on flat rocks. Brynja looked up as a diminutive figure sauntered toward them, bundled in the king's own coat and wearing his belt. And it was certainly not Thorin Oakenshield.

"Meisar!" Emli exclaimed, more stunned than amused to see her in such a state. She was scrubbing a strong soap along the blood-stain on her white traveling cloak. "Only a scratch, my lady," she hummed proudly, as Meisar studied her wrapped arm with concern. "Teach those filthy beasts to fire their bloody arrows at my son."

"Looking for yers?" Brynja asked. "Might be in there somewhere, _dunininh_." She rifled and searched the pile of clothes for hers, found none of her garments. "Mahal!" she grumbled. "Have no worry," soothed Emli. She dug through her own stack of garments. "Had to get you warm before it soaked you to the bone," Emli tut-tutted. "Probably left your clothes at the river trying to get you back alive and all." Meisar found, to her relief, the calico braies and tunic of her small-clothes.

"Well, can't very well walk in nothing but your undergarments," said Emli. "'Specially not with the lads about. Got a bigger bosom on ye Meisar than the lot of us," cackled Siv. The women grumbled in disapproval and Meisar nodded, flushing. "I have clothes in my pack, Emli. You don't need to-"

"Ah, here. I think this one will fit you. Green is a good color for you, does nicely with your hair," chirped Emli. She handed Meisar a green dress, pretty, with embroidered sleeves, and of soft linen, much finer quality than she was used to, though flimsier. Meisar smiled in a slight, but gracious way. "I thank you kindly, Emli."

She unbuckled the great mithril and silver belt and began to slip the coat from her shoulders when she caught Brynja staring at her intently, smiling. She brought it upward again to cover her shoulders, wrapped her arms around her middle defensively, staring back at her. "It does suit you," Brynja said finally, nodding to Thorin's coat and letting a modest grin. "Maybe hem it a bit."

VI

"Are you so intent on freezing to death, woman?" Thorin inquired tiredly under his breath as Meisar reentered the campsite. She was wearing a green linen dress, embroidered about the sleeves, and hugging her solid curves in a way the old jerkin and tunic hadn't quite accomplished.

"Your coat, my king, and your belt. I apologize if you missed them in my absence." She held out the heavy garments to him but he set them aside. "There is nothing to forgive, my lady." Meisar ducked her head graciously and turned to leave. "Meisar…" Thorin stood fast; he found his hands clasped to her waist just above the swell of hips. That green dress, so simple in its construction, and sparse in its adornment… but feminine altogether, more than he had ever expected to see. Her ample features were hugged, bosom and belly and hips stoutly defined. He swallowed a little and stammered a half-murmur of apology.

She did not want to admit just how _good_ it felt, that gentle yet commanding grip, and his fur-lined coat against her bare skin, and it made her think of how other things would feel against naked flesh. Like Thorin's heavy belt (nothing except it). Or his hair…

_No._ She jolted herself away from the thought, and perhaps with feigned surprise, found Thorin's eyes burning a hole in hers, his hands drawn back quickly from her. She turned to leave, wordlessly. "There is one thing," Thorin's voice rumbled after her. "I will not have you wind up dead, Meisar the Shepherdess. You're not to leave the company without my permission. Understood?"

She turned around to face him. There was a sparkling defiance in her eyes. He reached out and caught her chin in his hand and pressed against it lightly between his strong, thick fingers, raising her face to him. "Understood?" His fingers tightened around her face, his eyes something fierce burning at her.

Meisar held his hard gaze unflinchingly. "Yes, milord."


	13. SHEMALDURJ

**A/N: **Shemaldurj- "Curious Ground."

"Get you wrapped up good," Eda said gently. A blanket wrapped itself suddenly over Meisar's shoulders and around the front of her. Eda crouched down and rubbed her shoulders heartily. "That was a mighty thing you did, _dunininh,"_ she smiled. "Anbur is well. A wee shaken up, but just fine." "The king brought her back to you. Brought _us_ back."

"Give yourself some credit," sighed Eda. "The child can't swim, _dunininh_. She'd be right dead." "Never met a dwarf who could swim," replied Meisar. "And you went right into the rapids nonetheless," Eda reminded.

"You'll not like getting a late-summer fever. Them's the worst."She hugged the blanket a little tighter. "I'm a dwarf. I shan't worry much for that. Not like men we are, carried off by a wee cough."

Eda put her hands on her hips and grinned at the woman's casual defiance. "Won't kill you, but you'll not like being in the saddle with the river running from your nose harder than the Loudwater." Meisar squirmed at the thought. Wet hair left a single damp, icy print down the whole of her back, posterior and the backs of her legs. She felt cold in the light linen, as autumn forged its way down the valleys from the Misty Mountains in the East, a frosted breath of what was to come. "Mayhap in our mountain halls, we shirk away the plagues of men. _Yzbah._ Hot baths. We take them in the hot springs under the mountain. Oh, even the common baths in Erebor were marble with flecks of gold in the walls. That's why the plagues take off men like they do- they don't bathe none. Carry their stink for years along with the disease. Out here I reckon the lot of us dwarves aren't much better-faring, so I wouldn't take any chances if I were you."

She drank the hot strong herbal tea Eda had brought her. "Thorin brought me back. Made sure I was…" Her voice trailed off, trying to remember. It was all a blur, ears full of frigid water, sinuses stinging from it, and his voice, thundering over her. Being suddenly warm again and in his arms was all she knew. Fur on skin. She woke up again wrapped in his coat with no clothes on. She raised the cup and drank conspicuously slow enough for Eda to notice. She waited until the fire had faded from her cheeks to pull it away from her lips. "Just a bit hot is all, best drink slow," she murmured.

Hegi strode amongst the dwarves, wincing on pained feet but with her head raised high, making a rather excitable demonstration to an enthused audience of Bifur and Yrsa, both laughing hysterically at her gibbering and wild emoting. She mock-punched Bifur's gut and Yrsa rolled back on the grass belly-laughing. The healer too chuckled at the sight, Eda with her big warm plump hands, soft eyes and delicate wisp of a beard, ash blond going gray. The softness of her palms raised then and cradled Meisar's cheeks. "Learn from her and let a bit of that dwarven pride show. You have more to give than ever you know, lass."

Thorin and Dwalin with Bofur had gone to hunt and brought back several squirrels and a few braces of cony. They were eaten with potatoes slathered in butter and herbs, served mashed and with forks, doled out by Lulia and the dwarves who deigned to eat them scooped on two fingers drew a stern look from Urdlaug; she preferred her food treated with a reverence unfamiliar to certain members of the company. Dwalin was eating a raw red potato off the tip of a hunting knife and grinning amusedly at Freyda struggling to balance a plate on her elbow and a tankard of mead in her good hand. "Rats!" she cried as her plate tumbled onto the grass and Meisar's dogs were snarfing her supper before she could get another string of curses out.

Dwalin stopped smiling when she looked up down him self-pitiably. "What good's a dwarf with one hand?" Freyda raised her bandaged ax-hand and winced. The fingers were swollen and purple under the wrap. "Certainly not this one." As soon as she plunked down empty-handed at the cook-fire, Dwalin moved stealthily to her side to offer up half of his potatoes, pushing them over to the side of his plate nearest her, and without a word, just a mild grunt. He held her surviving tankard of mead for her while she ate a bit, gratefully. "Ah, bless yer beard Mister Dwalin."

"I suppose I owed you a favor," he muttered. "Aye," she grinned. "Pray ye don't need that more than a day." She gestured at his arm and Dwalin winced at the makeshift sling Oin had set it in. "Aye," he repeated. "It hurt?" she asked, strangely soft and shrinking. "Not more than a bit. And yer fingers, lass?" Freyda found the palm of her injured hand rested suddenly and delicately on the back of the hand he'd raised to her to see. "A little sore is all." Dwalin turned to issue a menacing side-eye to the 'Ri brothers and Bofur who were looking in his direction a little too amusedly for his comfort. They went back to their cony and potatoes quick enough. Freyda's hand was still rested gingerly atop his own, and he felt the slightest of tremor course from her palm and to the tips of her fingers to make tiny waves upon the back of his hand. "Didn't mean to hurt ye lass." She gave him a forgiving smile in return, her strong-bridged nose twitching lightly when he finally mustered up enough of _something_ to look in her eyes directly. "I gave ye my hand to squeeze. Got only my own self to blame there."

His chest heaved in a hesitant sigh toward her as she moved to stand, tankard empty. "Sit tight, lass. I'll bring ye another."

II

In the morning Thorin looked for Meisar, half-expecting her to have gone ahead before dawn against his command, but she was dutiful, scurrying all about the camp early.

She still donned the green dress, though a heavy vest of boiled leather was worn over it now, collar of goldenrod-haired cony long gone ragged drawn up about her neck. Her legs were cased in wraps of tattered wool, two layers of calico braies to give the appearance of light breeches rather than a precarious extra layer of small-clothes, seeing as the her skirt was rucking up about the saddle when the dwarves had finally gotten up and mounted to move on. She wore no cloak, and her boots squelched a bit still wet in the stirrups. The wolf-pelt mantle was laid across the tops of her thighs in the saddle for modesty's sake if nothing else.

It was such a lovely garment. She had seen Thorin's eyes, even Dwalin and Nori's, when she turned up in it. A rough woman in genteel clothes however simple was just that kind of sight, she reckoned. Nothing more, nothing less. Perhaps they even mocked her out of her earshot and sight for trying. Not Thorin though. There had been something different, even frightening about the way he looked at her. Different even from the way he had looked at her as she lay wrapped in his coat, naked beneath. The thought of what he had done, necessary to save her, at the riverside, dizzied her. _He was a king, and she…_

She moved her hips against the pressure of the belt around her waist. _You know what you are trying to do. Stop._ She raged at herself like a scolding mother. Plucked from the waters by him, warmed by him, wrapped in his own coat. But nothing, _nothing_ had felt quite like his hands. There was no mystery in it, no grand overture. No purpose except to halt her from walking away, it seemed. But she had seen his face, eyes wide with surprise in contrast to pupils that turned sapphire to onyx, wondered what she must have felt like to him, under his hands. Had he ever touched a woman as he grasped at her clumsily just then? Her body was a dwarf's body, in spite of her face. Roomy hips, strong and stout to the touch, "birthing hips," as men would say of their wives amongst the tall-folk, squat matrons with hearty broods that had been spry little maids once. She had neither borne a child nor had a husband anchored eager hands to those hips at night and lovingly sought what was in their midst, or so Brynja's reticent whispers amongst the dwarrowdams went. A woman's hips were a powerful thing, whether elf or dwarf or human. That so much she knew.

Pained moans halted the caravan nearly as soon as it had started to move. Hegi's wagon had caught fire and burned to ash at the river, and the tempestuous she-boar that had drawn it had fled in the chaos. The burn blisters on her feet had opened in the night and agonized her too much to walk. She lay down on the grass while Bifur pulled off her boots only to draw back shuddering at the sight of her red, cracked soles, one of the toes nearly charred. He held her hand while Eda and Oin slathered her in healing ointment to the ankles and bandaged her. So Meisar offered her Jenny's mount, the least she could offer her for mettle against the orcs. She was a madwoman in full, but her particular brand of madness had saved the lot of them. _Much madness in this world_, she thought. _Coupled with the redeeming._

She thought of Thorin under the mountain, sick with gold-lust. Charging from the gates to battle ready to give his life in defense of something greater, when all was brought back 'round. Were they so different, a mad miner and a tragic king? Jenny threw her head back and brayed at the former, refusing to walk on, until Meisar walked beside her at her bridle for nearly all the afternoon. Her own feet grew sore and her knees stiff. Even her hounds had jumped on Eda and Siv's wagon eventually, but she went on afoot. _Hurmul. A leader sacrificed for those trusted to them. _The caravan moved slowly enough along the terrain for her to keep up the pace, following what might barely be called a road in the more civilized parts. It would do; she knew her way home.

They kept northwest along the Loudwater, treading toward Rivendell. Shallow forests, leaves yellowed ahead of the coming autumn, gave way to scrub, and they had gone single-file where the road narrowed to a beaten path through a stretch of chaparral, islands of weathered rock peaking in its midst.

Thorin waited for the caravan to pass ahead of him, deciding to bring up the rear as he squinted to the setting sun in the west, the wind from the east growing chill. Meisar and Hegi finally made their way past.

"Will you not ride?" he asked impatiently. "Surely a dwarf could make room on the saddle." He eyed Hegi a bit accusingly but she shrugged dumbly back at him. The king's eye turned back to Meisar. She looked pale and chilled, her eyes and nose both starting to water. "I am perfectly fine, my liege. Carry on." She waved Jenny through, finally resigned to Hegi's mount, and unseeing how Thorin's eyes had suddenly narrowed at her.

"You test me, woman," he half-snarled, and without warning, she was scooped up in one fell movement and plopped roughshod on the saddle before him. "Oouf," was the sound she made when he circled her body with one arm and hoisted her upward. It was a funny sound, like one of the pack animals would make but higher and surprised, and she could see the dwarrowdams at the back of the caravan coming through the road having a nervous giggle amongst each other at the sight. His arms reached around the front of her to grasp at the reins and when his thighs squeezed impatiently at Minty's flanks to spur her again, she could feel the flex of his body, his middle, even his chest, through all the layers of his clothes, ever so lightly against her back. He was pressed to her, the fur of his great-coat tickling the back of her neck, his breath impatient and warm there the same.

"As you like it, my king. Thank you." He grunted in response and she made no more talk then. She had thought of him too much, too unbecomingly, too _greedily. _He had made her weak when she could least be weak. The creases of his elbows and the upper parts of both his arms were not so drawn about her now, only a brush of forearm when he moved. Her weaponry belt would have to do in that case, or the genteel clinch of linen about her midsection, to make again what she had felt that day past in the camp. He was a king after all. To think there was some greater purpose behind his ministrations, his touch, even his utter need of her comfort, was a foolhardy venture, a dangerous one. _He was a king, dead or alive, a king. _She pressed the bony mass at the base of her abdomen ever more slightly against the saddle horn.

III

They made camp under the cold veil of dusk.

Autumn was coming down from the foothills, an icier wind one could taste in its breath just out of range. Summer nights here were still heavy, but denser, cold and clammy like a fever sweating out on a cold night.

Thorin lay down at the edge of the sleeping dwarves as he always did. Away. Dwalin was on watch. He was alone and should have preferred it that way. Wheezing, Meisar was circling the edges of their encampment with torchlight when he summoned through the dark.

"Sit," he ordered. She sunk into the ground beside him, her legs tucked beneath her. She set aside the bedroll and set of blankets she had rolled up and carried on her back. She looked paler and ragged; her breath seemed short and a line of water had creased at the reddening corners of her eyes. He took her hands in his before she had a chance to respond, his fingers pushed up against her own. He rubbed her arms up to the bare elbow. She shivered at the sensation of his large, callused hands moving over her skin but her body betrayed her and she jerked away, half in alarm, half feeling quite overwhelmed. "You're cold," he said. "Cold but with a fever coming. I can feel it."

"The nights here have been chill, milord."

"No. You need to stay warm or you'll be deathly ill by sunup. You've run yourself ragged." He shrugged off the fur overcoat and wrapped it about her. "Do you not also need your layers, my king? To cushion the ground perhaps? It is hard here. And chill… as you say."

"I am fine," he replied tersely. She hugged the coat closer, self-consciously. Her cheek against the rough fur at its shoulders triggered a shiver quite unlike fever. Her stomach clenched. "My king, I…"

"Lay down," he muttered. He evened out his bedroll on the ground without looking at her, tossing his cloak down on top.

"Pardon milord?"

"Lay beside me and we will share warmth then. Lay the coat underneath, and take my blanket. It will cover the both of us if you wish to… stay here."

She gave Thorin a knowing half-smile. "If it is my warmth you are concerned for, I should go lay by Donbur. Fattest is the warmest after all." Her heart was pounding so hard she was sure he could hear it, more furious and rumbling than all the snores of the 'Urs combined. _A joke. A wee splash of humor and perhaps he will not see. Perhaps he will not…_

"When four bowls of stew come out as air it smells like a troll cave. Wouldn't you prefer to breathe?" Thorin grumbled entirely without amusement.

"I would prefer to breathe," she whispered. Trembling hands pushed her bedroll to Thorin's so that the earth was fully covered between them. She lay with her wolf-pelt over her and Thorin with his cloak over himself. He covered Meisar without a word and she found herself stiffening against the warmth that suddenly enveloped her, with his arms roughly setting around her. A harsh breath drew into her lungs and he drew away a bit. Made some sound but no word; she could hear him swallow harsh and awkward together. "Forgive me, my lady."

A nod of forgiveness lessened his rigidity but only a little, and then she rolled, clumsy and involuntarily, over on her blanket, so that they lay for an awkward moment belly to belly, the tip of his strong nose brushing hers. "My lady…" he muttered, as Meisar turned to lay on her side facing away from him, cracking the cartilage along her spine as she flexed, her back against his chest. Her heat by his side comforted him. He could not have imagined the heat that would radiate from so tiny a thing. Meisar was warm, and she smelled sweet and sharp like grass.

There was a warmth inside her that savored the closeness of him, a feeling she knew was intrinsic to all living beings. His scent was woodsy, campfire-smoke, damp earth and musk. His hair fell over her when he moved to adjust his position beside her, and she became momentarily absorbed in the heady scent of it. It could have used a good wash but in her mind, he smelled the way a man should, raw and masculine. She nestled into the fur of his overcoat that he had laid across her, inhaled its stubborn aroma. It carried his distinct earthy scent, pine-needles and sweat and a hint of hot metal. She imagined what he would be like with a woman.

Rough perhaps, if perceptive, she surmised, and grinned to herself out of his sight.

She squirmed awkwardly, felt the fine tremor in her body, the raised hairs on her forearms and the back of her neck, at his closeness. The heat of their bodies radiated in the cold night and he sighed, a contented sound which surprised her.

He seemed to sleep quickly to her relief though she did not. She need to, but how could she? The heat in her was coming quickly and then draining out of her entire being again in an instant, leaving her shivering. In his sleep, Thorin's arm extended clumsily, lay over her stilly as she held her breath, and curled tighter about her 'cross her torso. His entire body seemed to lurch then and roll, entirely onto her and she stopped breathing altogether. Suddenly her lungs were filled with heat, his coat and furs and his body and breath, and she was engulfed, utterly drowned.

She rolled over quickly and nervously so that her back pressed up against his chest, her head tucked just beneath his chin. Trapped by his arm she was, so heavy it felt over her, clothed in layers upon layers, but she could feel his warmth all the same, his need. His palm opened before her as his arm shifted.

Ever since that first touch, as she lay bruised and sore, it was his hands that intrigued her so. A blacksmith's hands- she had learned years ago the blacksmith's distinct forge calluses- hands tough and relentless, though capable of creating works of fine craftsmanship whether from pig metal or diamond. Things of great beauty needed to be handled by hands as careful and considerate as the ones he had handled her bruised face with… _Thorin… Thorin… THORIN._

She banished the thought. She tried.

Inching away from him, her movement stirred him, but his arm did not move from where it had lain about her. In his half-consciousness, he could have well been hugging his sword, his pack, even Dwalin. It mattered not. And yet a hot tinge pooling in the very wellspring of his yearnings wrested him suddenly from his sleep, feeling something tickle at the palm of his hand. He looked about and prayed _Mahal do not let her wake, for I am…_

Her eyes fixed languidly upon his hand, her fingertip in his palm and pressing silently to it. (_Tried, she had_). How small her hand felt lightly brushing against his thick fingers. She drew her finger lightly across the callus on one palm. "You were a blacksmith once," she murmured, shyly.

"Aye." He nodded quietly. She drew her thumb across the ridges of his knuckles, studying the thick fingers which seemed so much larger than her own. When he exhaled awkwardly without thinking, she craned her head to him, nearly as timid. He found her eyes yielding to the same curiosity, tinged with the same fear of the unknown, but kind, unresisting. His lips found hers and began to devour her.

Her own lips parted as shy acceptance of his, and mimicked the undulations of his mouth with her own. He found her tender and yielding, not the Meisar he had known thus far on the road, that hard, enigmatic little woman, like bending a cage of steel with one's bare hands she was. And so pliant, practically boneless, in his arms.

The first dip of tongue into her mouth caught her by surprise. Thorin stroked her hair back when she pulled away, his eyes with pupils blown undeterred by her sudden trepidation. "Majesty…" was all she managed to sigh forth, meekly, before he was kissing her fully again.

It was no use resisting; she felt the surge of heat in her, and in him, the tingling sensations his touch created within her. His warm breath and the harsh intoxicating taste of his mouth held at hers possessively, a flick of tongue against her lips begging for entrance. They parted cautiously, Thorin's tongue purposeful and determined like him, with its long absence from a woman's mouth written into its hungry ministrations.

Just as quickly she broke it, pulling her lips from his and tugging at his bottom one lightly as she jerked away, and scampered to her feet fleeing the campsite entirely. "Meisar!" he called, even the deep resonance of his voice lost on the night air, which she had disappeared into as quickly as he could no longer feel the heated nectar of her lips on his.

She bolted into the trees alone, found a good base to nestle against and put her face to the cool, earthy moss, her legs seeming to give way and turn to mush beneath her. Her mind twisted and seared and her conscience, her primal understanding of her own nature, raged at her. She yet tasted Thorin's kiss; it lingered, the mead and the raw heat of his breath.

She hated herself in the midst of this strange sense of flattery and the foreignness her own desires kindling in a place so deep inside her she had never dared to explore it. Who was she that Thorin Oakenshield would kiss her the way men did in the old romantic legends? Beren pining for Lúthien ached at her separateness for they were so unlike each other (even though Lúthien was an elf and the daughter of the loathed Thingol, she loved that tale as a girl). Beren, the mortal-man took the weight of great darkness and Herculean feats in the name of his love, his nightingale, a mortal man common as she, come to wed the daughter of an Elven king after many trials. How she had loved that tale so. She could not even remember who had first told it to her.

_Who was she now?_ If not the lonely girl who left Bira and Bombur's safe hearth for the wilderness. Treacherous beasts aside, it was aloneness, and aloneness was always safe. Meisar the Beardless. Meisar the Shepherdess. When the people walked through into the great halls of Erebor, who would she be among them then? She could face the world, learn a trade, maybe blacksmithing or masonry, and live as men did, respected at least for her skill. Or go back to the wilds, and when she grew old and readied to die, find a cave or a rock face to perish under the way dwarves did in the pain of exile.

She had lived as such for far too long, and was growing weary of it. Her aloneness had devoured her, not in the way Thorin kissed but a hollow, unnatural consumption. The wind took her by the face, raising the lingering burn of Thorin's beard against her cheek. Meisar returned to the campsite, hoping to find Thorin where she'd left him.

"Meisar?" he murmured in the dark. She sighed, nervously. "I am here, my king."

"Have I frightened you?"

He took her by both hands and pulled her down beside him. Propped on his elbow, he lay on his side facing her, sitting up, legs tucked beneath her again, hands in her lap wringing against each other. "No my Lord. I am, flattered, truly, though I am not accustomed…" She had a vulnerability about her that he was not entirely sure how to interpret.

"Do not fear," he murmured back. "I mean well toward you."

"I know, I, do not doubt… your intentions are kind and… my king, it is only that I have never-"

_Never_. It sparked inside of him something raw and intrigued, and he cupped her by her cheeks with rough hands, stroking the peak of her cheekbones with the pads of his thumbs. Her countenance was timid but the heat he felt in her was feral. "Never?" he whispered, a subtle inquiry however heated.

She nodded no, cheeks dusted with blush that he could feel the hot flush of even in the dark of night. "You saved me from a rather pathetic end. And for that I thank you kindly."

"Make no mention of it. It is my duty only."

"Duty? Methinks it is more than that."

"It is. Now… would you share warmth so that you do not catch a fever?"

It caught her by surprise and froze her for a moment. Her legs uncurled slowly, and Thorin gently nudged her by her shoulder to lay back. Supine, she took deep, trembling breaths through her nose and exhaled lightly from her mouth, thinking if her breathing would steady, so would her heart. To no avail. She felt the touch of a fingertip along her jawline in the dark. "You have guided us well and honorably. I would not want for you to fall ill."

She nodded, lips parted without a word able to leave them. He wrapped her into his furs again, covered them together with a warm blanket. He lay his head on Meisar's wolf-pelt mantle, which she had laid on the ground beside them, and pushed a section of it under her head as a pillow. "Are you warm?" he murmured lowly, her back against his chest, the thunder of his heart rumbling over her spine, even through his many layers of clothes. Meisar drew slightly closer to him. And thus was her answer.

His arm lay over her, rested heavily against her belly. She was so soft there, soft but strong.

Hot breath tingled against her scalp. _Did he not see what he was doing to her? _"These years must have been very… lonely," Meisar said cautiously in the dark.

"Lonely? No. Preoccupied, yes. But lonely… no. The only lonely people are the ones who have nothing else on their minds."

_Liar _she thought to herself. Over and over she had repeated those exact words, so much it became a mantra playing in her head, to justify that empty space. Perhaps she and Thorin were more alike than they had ever imagined, and she was not sure whether that was a good omen or a dread one.


	14. IZRUKH

**A/N: Izrukh- The Longing**

Sun wrinkles ringed her eyes in the morning light. She blinked and woke suddenly seeing it was past dawn, before the touch of a coarse beard on her cheek startled her fully and she sprung nearly to her feet in one harsh movement. They had lain there, on the edge of the camp, bedrolls pushed together, her mantle draped over both of their bodies, and they were close. _She thought it had been a dream, just like all the others._

"_Dunininh?"_ Thorin rolled over sleepily. "They cannot see us like this!" she gasped, scrambling up all her blankets and cloak. He reached and set his hand over hers firmly. "Meisar…" "My king, last night…" she interjected in a half-gasp. The very thought of it was staining the already ruddy cheeks a little more crimson in color. Her skin began to tighten around the neck and jaw-line, prickly with heat.

"Last night I was glad for your company, Meisar." Laying on his back there he looked almost innocent, peaceful. And though it warmed her, it frightened her too. Had grief softened his heart, or driven him mad, she did not know. She searched his face for a bloom of regret, for confusion, for a dark prickle of lust. She found his eyes unreadable though, always two states, melancholy pools of royal blue or harsh altogether, like holes punched in a winter's lake. But there was something deeper now that she could see clear as day, something he was trying to tell her with his eyes as if such things were foreign to his tongue. There were no words, anyway, none more than had already been said, or could be, before they dwarves would be stirring.

"We must wake now." She wanted to be in his arms but they couldn't remain, not now. Mayhap not ever again. The door had been opened and her instinct told her to slam it shut again. She glanced about skittishly for Dwalin, imagining him to be near and _if he saw what then?_

She was no longer made of such sturdy stuff, it seemed. "We must wake. The road is long," she repeated in a whisper. Still she took her jerkin, her mantle, and right up to the undyed wool travelling cloak she so detested for the itch and heaviness of it, and layered them all on like armor. "We must wake. We must wake…"

.

Meisar tended the morning tasks with a set determination to put the previous night out of her memory. _Thorin _his name still thumped in her head, the taste of his kiss lingering in her mouth. As if he were cut from the marble, he was hard yet exquisite to her, and not in the way that important and powerful folk were charming or charismatic. Thorin Oakenshield was none of these, and yet…

Perhaps it was a more animal attraction after all, she thought then, ashamed of herself. Primal and inexplicable. Thorin gave off a commanding presence in his coat of furs and unassuming journeyman's attire, though clad in rings and a belt of silver and mithril there seemed some stubborn and quiet dignity about him. A king surely, and one that his people eagerly awaited and proudly bent their knee to, but a king who for the time lodged 'round the fires and sopped up the earth in his skin at night with the rest of them.

He had kissed her. None had ever done that before.

There then, Thorin was at the morning-fire with Dwalin, Donbur, Balin, and Bofur, for the moment finishing off bread and warmed over stew. He studied her with a strange reverence, brow furrowed against the sun straining to catch her eye in the morning light. Meisar bowed her head lightly at a distance, studying him, every facet of his being. How he had a shorter beard than most dwarves, and a nose like the prow of a warship. And magnificently sad blue eyes that caught hers just for a moment.

A king was a king, and she was… she knew not what she was. An orphan. A refugee. A nobody. Thorin himself was two of these things. Perhaps he saw in her what he saw in himself.

.

The moved early. For the greater part of the day, none of the dwarves seemed to sense a pattern out of the ordinary, and their path settled. The road was clear and unhindered, the sky pristine. _So did the sun come after the storm and the darkness, indeed, indeed. _She did not treat with Thorin that night or the next except at meals, and there was an uncanny silence between them. Was he thinking about that night? They had exchanged glances, supping on goat jerky and cheese rolls, and she knew he was. Another's desire was a rare and mysterious thing to her, as foreign as the un-traveled lands of Mordor or the Northern Wastes. Men had tried to have their way with her, in villages and roadside inns over the years. It was lewd and primal and she should have understood its nature, but it only frightened her then, and she had guarded the honor of her body from them most ardently. The way men looked at her, whispered about her. Even the rare elf seemed fascinated to see her alone. If elves were cold and distant, men were not. Their heat was a sweaty, sticky one that made her skin feel dirty. She was so _small_ and mysterious. _Oh what would it be like to have a woman like that? A dwarf. Their male-folk give them no satisfaction, men would whisper. They prefer cold metal to a woman's warmth. How heart-sick she must be, a woman and a dwarf alone._

.

When they had gone to water their animals, Minty the Second and Jenny were rubbing flanks as they drank, as if an unseen hand of the greater universe had reached itself down and made it so. Had Emli, long married and well-wizened to such things, not said that herself? _The Creator shall make it known and it will be as clear as day_**.** They were stationed stiffly at the heads of their ponies, facing each other, the blue of his eyes threatening to drown her. It seemed, for the moment, all of the other dwarves had been shuttled out of their small temporary universe. A world that was a straight line and it led into his eyes…

The meeting of their eyes went on for a long moment, shutting out the other dwarves. If only they could see how she was drowning and he was burning. Fire and ice eliminating each other, or the same, consuming each other whole, making something anew from their joining.

_(A Great Flood)_

_._

She watched him braid his hair that night. At a safe distance she lowered but clandestinely tilted her head, looking all too busy fixing Freyda's ax handle for her while her fingers were still swelled. The dwarves around them were readying for bed and paid neither of them much mind.

He took out the temple plaits and the silver-and-sapphire beads that clasped them, always glinting nobly at his shoulders. He put them into a small bowl that seemed especially for that purpose, a wide and a smaller-toothed comb laid out before him along with it. He undid another plait that had been lost on her, in the thick mane of hair that trailed down over his shoulders. It was clasped with a large gold ring. She watched him wince with the larger comb and then the smaller against the snarls left by the day's travels to that particular plait. He lifted a handful that seemed a bramble's nest in one hand and grunted as he untangled it one hair at a time it would seem. Never tearing it and raking through it the way she did her own. To see him treat his person with such reverence warmed her in ways she had never known. Perhaps it was the thickness of his fingers and how delicate they were in the re-doing of the temple plaits. He braided them slowly but efficiently, with knowing hands. He didn't make use of a mirror.

If only he could have treated his own heart with such reverence. It made her sad when he had finished.

She turned at the sound of Gimli issuing a feeble grunting protest, which his mother quickly snuffed. Emli was seated daintily on a rock with Gimli seated slumping and sour-faced before her, his hair across her lap being combed. She put it in one plait, stopping every third of the way down to clasp it in rings of burnished gold. If she saw that the clasps were unevenly spaced when she finished, she took her son by the scruff of his neck, proud and ornery as the lad was in protest, and took the whole braid out and started again.

In contrast there was the softer sound of Brynja and Bofur, her wrapping the boar-tooth-and-twine in a tiny pouch after he'd combed out her undone hair and she his, and they climbed into their wagon for the night. It would be rocking on its wheels soon enough and Urdlaug, Emli and probably Dori (the old fusspot) with them would be throwing stones at its sides to hush them, grousing about the impropriety of it all. Some things were made to be between two and two alone after all, if that was the old-fangled but ever steady code of conduct amongst dwarves. _(This flock was something else to be reckoned with in this case)._

She had not for a moment stood to stretch her weary limbs than Thorin entered her space and muttered to her a quiet goodnight in passing. He stopped though, closer than he had been since _that night,_ and his lips moved but again made no sound. She could see Balin and Dwalin looking between them at a distance and it was of no care to her, not anymore. Thorin's eyes seemed fixed and distant the longer he lingered, wordless and tense, in her midst, and all she longed to do was pull his arm in hers, comfort him, take all the cruel things in his head away, whatever they were this night, or any night before. Take up his comb and braid his hair for him. Her fingertips tingled at the very notion, that she might someday do for him in that manner as none had done for her, and none for him in that way before, mayhap. (_A Firebeard lass, alas, alas)._

.

Eda checked her bruised ribs before bed, in the warm light of her wagon, cluttered as it was with her potions in their little bottles and clusters of herbs and roots. A harsh tumble on the river-rocks had given her a lingering ache. Soft nurturing hands on her skin squeezing here and there to check for fractures, internal bleeding, did their work carefully. Eda had given her a tingly, medicine-y paste to rub onto her chest and breathe in to avoid a fever and the filling of the lungs. "Should heal up in a few days," the medicine woman assured gently, wrapping her midsection below the heavy sheaves of her bosom. The sensitive ends of her there had curled into harsh points against the night air, the way they had done that night inside her tunic, the familiar weakening sensation of it taking hold and she willed the flush and prickling of her skin to lay low in Eda's presence. Never had she wanted to be out of the healer's sight so quickly, imagining she could _tell._ Read in her body that newness. Eda had never married and had grown old a maid by now; what would she know? _She had delivered babes alas; a dwarrowdam's body would be no mystery to an old medicine-woman._ Meisar slumped a bit, keeping her wits on the outside anyway. She signed, resigning herself to a hawkish self-consciousness. It certainly couldn't hurt.

"No more crossing rivers and blowing bridges," chuckled Eda kindly at last. "No more orcs," she added, a bit of lightheartedness shining through that Eda seemed to take a notice of. "Between you and the king we are in good hands. Good hands." "Yes, yes we are." She pulled back on her tunic and the heavy leather vest, and wrapped herself tight in her mantle and its fur, and stepped out into the night air to make a final circle of the perimeter with her dogs.

_Hurmul. _ The word had come back at her but it was different now. To protect him. To treat his heart with the reverence he seemed unable to. And they would all be in good hands then, not the least herself. Thorin had already drifted off, flanked in bedrolls by Dwalin and Balin. He slept alone some nights; others, more often than not it seemed, the overbearing brothers kept close to him. _And why shouldn't they? They had lost him once, maybe more._

If only he would come to _her_ again. Her own dwarvish covetousness had risen in her, against her fear of his purpose. If Dwalin, and now Balin too it would seem, were onto her, perhaps they saw it in her, and would close ranks, aggressively if necessary, around their king. The way they could read him, one supposed, would make it so and understandable. (Balin had always been kind to her though). Thorin's primal purpose and desires had been laid bare for them to see in all its rawness, for gold, for glory, for vengeance, and now, for all the ghosts.

He had turned to her in the night and sought what he couldn't from them alas, whether in a moment of weakness or no, and she wanted him back. To come to her again and seek her comfort, and take her in his arms and kiss her. Clasp her hands in his hair and hers in his and feel his beard slip against her tongue in their clumsy ministrations, clumsy but raw, and raw was pure after all.


	15. AGÂNI

**A/N: 'AGÂNI- The Beginning**

Dwalin had already put out Thorin's bedroll and blankets beside his own. A sliver of space was left at the king's side. _Was this some kind of game? Some test? _Meisar pondered it dispiritedly, pressing a blanket into the space hesitantly, and pushing up as close against Freyda and as far as she could from Thorin, lying to her right and already snoring, by the time she had followed from a final perimeter check.

The silence of the night aside from the wind-heavy night-music made by sleeping dwarves only sharpened her mind, when it should have been weary from a long day. The texture of his mouth, wet and heated inside, tongue slightly rough as it was demanding, she remembered. The abrasiveness of his beard on her chin and the heat of his breath across her face rushing from his nose like a bellow while he kissed, bristles rubbing up quite ardently even against her teeth. It had not left her, not for a moment. It was the only thought that could lull her into the comparative peace of sleep.

It was still dark when she woke again from a dream of red rain. She thought it was blood turned to icy pellets, but it was rubies. Hundreds of thousands of rubies raining down. She rolled to her left to lay on her side, ribs still aching. Thorin's clenched hand drew itself up toward his chest and she found herself, without forethought, reaching to clasp the clenched fist tightly in her hand. Fingers clasping close to the tense skin of his knuckles, his opposite arm, which he had been using as a pillow, flung itself out from under his head and came to rest with gentleness almost too purposeful for sleep, over her head. Fingers knotting in her sleep-mussed hair with their callused tips scraping the back of her neck through the thick mane and curling to get a heavier grasp on her, his forearm rested on her cranium. The opposite fist un-clenched beneath her fingers, taking the tips of her own on his four, thumb giving her little finger a careful stroke, how rough it was his skin, yet so gentle. A hot plume of breath and rasp of beard against her forehead. When Dwalin stirred, she rolled away carefully, closed her eyes and tried to sleep again. _Tried, tried she had._

.

In his unconscious he had been tenderer. When he woke, he was edgy.

He had sensed her presence, however subtly, during the night hours, but she was gone by the time he woke again and stretched, achingly, against the pile of dwarves laid out in lumps all about him, their stale mead-heavy breath and the dense heat from their closeness making him feel tense. He had seen his sister weeping again, heard her cries in the great empty halls of Erebor and followed them to a throne adorned in ash, where she knelt like a penitent, weeping, weeping, until the tears came no more and her body disintegrated from grief and hunger and dryness before him. The ash kept falling in a rain until it weighed down the very stone he stood upon and carried him into the darkness below.

"Are you quite alright, Thorin?" asked Balin gently. His morning bread and hard cheese untouched, Balin put a hand to his shoulder. "Thorin?"

"Yes, Balin. A bit tired is all."

"Care for some of Freyda's black drink?" a gentle voice asked from behind. Meisar took a hesitant seat, as if he would rebuke her, his eyes full of ghosts again (_she knew that look, so many times before, on so many faces)._

"It is quite bitter and hot, but it may give you energy for the day." Thorin took the cup from her, blankly. Erebor and Thror at his desk, its intoxicating smell all around the great room, and Thror's steady hand on this treaty or that. He had bent down and put his arms out to him, a little prince who could fit upon his knee still so easily. Black drink, carved tusks taller than he, and plums from the south. Thror wrapped his small hand about one of the firm, dark fruits. "_Bring it to your sister. It is her favorite."_

She put her cloak to the side on top of his own, between them. Thorin's steady imbibing grew jerky, as if he would choke. He put the cup aside in haste as his throat closed off. She stared at the tightening of his neck under the skin, puckered just under the chin, the swell in its center constricting. It was the trembling of the hand that had held the drink that frightened her, wrapped all too tight around the cup, too hot, much too hot. But still he gripped, so hard she thought it might crack. The opposite hand slid under the pile of their cloaks to hide how it too trembled. Dwalin was drawing near and the tremor had spread, to his lip. Quivering, it struggled to still itself. Instead it trembled harder and the vein on the side of his neck began to swell and pulse. He would not hold. He would not hold unless…

She slid her hand beneath the cover of cloaks and sought his hand clumsily. The leather of his vambraces gave way to skin and his thick fingers found and clutched tightly at her seeking hand. Tender at first, threading her fingers through his, he grasped her palm to palm and fingers entwined. He held tight, and then tighter. He did not so much as eye her in his peripheral. Dwalin came to sit and make small talk and his hand was still trembling, gripping ever more harshly until she could feel the bones begin to crunch and creak, muffled by the cover of cloaks. _He could not see. He would not see. Hurmul. I will protect him. Comfort him._

Her face willed itself not to scrunch or wince in pain from his grip. He held her so tightly she could feel the pulse in her fingertips rise into a panicky gallop, then begin to tingle. The pain went from a mild cramping sensation to a sharp burn.

"Thorin?" Balin asked again, lined eyes beginning to narrow with concern. The vise of his hand eased suddenly and drew away, and Meisar breathed outward in relief, as quietly as she could manage. "The morning is half gone," he said steadily to Dwalin and Balin. "Let us move on."

He stood as if nothing had happened, fetching up his cloak, leaving Meisar to draw her hand innocuously away. Fundin's sons both gazed at her intently as Thorin saddled Minty solitarily nearby. Balin's eye shifted to her left hand, a moment ago mean and red; the tinge of green-purple bruise was beginning to surface on the skin. Her fingers flexed in and out, as if in wanting to grasp something that was not there.

II

"It couldn't be," Dori insisted. "The king would never… It is simply not… _proper._" He sipped his tea with indignation. A late-night fire with mead and weenies on spits had attracted half a dozen of them, turning Donbur's midnight snack into a busy gathering.

"He is not the same," Dwalin put out heavily. "Battle knocked his head somewhere else. The Shire…" Balin shook his head at the memory of Bilbo Baggins (bless his hairy toes!), how he had last beheld him, peering down from the blockaded gate as the hobbit walked out of Erebor in tears. _If only dwarves were as forgiving._

Balin heaved a tired, contemplative sigh at the gathered dwarves about their fire, drinking in the wee hours as wired as ever. "And what, brother, might temper his woes quite like a lady's company, if it is that?"

"She's a retiring kind. Could be he prefers the company of a strong silent type." "Nay," decreed Siv stoutly. "See the way they look at each other? Like predators. About to eat each other up." She nipped half a sausage in one bladed bite, causing a few of the male dwarves to squirm.

"Unlikely," insisted Dori again.

Dwalin and Ori shrugged in defeat. "Couldn't say what kind of lady would please his eye. Two hundred years I have not seen it," mused Balin. "A bitty redhead maybe?" suggested Freyda. Dwalin had taken a seat beside her there at the fire. He plucked a bit of meat off her skewer for her, hand still useless, just as he had poured her mead for her, set her blanket about her shoulders.

"Bitty in height anyway," an anonymous voice offered, sounded like Nori. The rest of the dwarves grumbled disapprovingly. "Didn't say it was a bad thing."

Dwalin glared at him but by now, with the drink, his mood was bizarrely gleeful. "More to worship is what I say, when it comes to choosing a lass. No willow-weed can handle a dwarf's… energy, when he's in _that _mood," Dwalin chuckled thunderously. Freyda withdrew blushing into the pocket of darkness just behind him. "A bit o' meat on her'll keep ye warm at night," Nori clucked. "'Specially if she's a big broad among men, taller than you by a head at least and fat too, good to curl into at night. Keeps all of you warm."

Dori's teacup rattled again. "What you did as a ruffian out in the wild is no topic I wish to discuss, and you ought to be ashamed to," Dori huffed. "Your brother does not need to hear." Ori scribbled something furiously in his great book, listening as intently to Nori as ever. Dori shut it on him. "Go on to bed now, Ori. It's late."

"He's a grown lad." Nori winked at his younger brother. "Aren't you, Ori?"

"I'm grown!" Ori insisted, straightening his shoulders. Dori waved him off and fumed at Nori. "What kind of dwarf are you? Worse than a thief. Snuggle down with an orc you would if it promised not turn you in. And you call the lady Meisar's a tall-whore's daughter for getting you red handed and reddening your knuckles? Shame on you,"

"I'm a dwarf that knows how to get me old brother all ruffled," Nori jabbed. "Anyway, what do you care so much for _her_ honor all of a sudden, brother? Just remember I'm not the only wildling kind in this company. Think I'm the only one getting into a wee something-something?" "Now you're talking stupidly. Enough drink," scolded Dori again.

"Leave a dwarf to his- or her- own, you know that's what happens," Nori raised his eyebrows slyly. The dwarves seemed only moderately interested in what he had to say but that never shut him up. "Keep an eye on that one I would. The quiet ones will always getcha. One minute it's tracking orcs with that stiff face o' hers. Next she'll have a king's bastard in her belly and _he'll _be the one not remembering a minute of how it came to be, you know what I'm saying. A lass could use such a thing to her advantage in these times."

"What poppycock!" Dori groused. "We are _dwarves_, not unscrupulous menfolk." "Well out in the rough, we know our potion-making for things. Like you," Nori put a wet finger into Oin's ear after he'd taken out the ear trumpet against their banter, all flustered himself. He slapped Nori's hand. "I don't make those kind of potions that is for sure. I aim to cure, not to handicap," insisted Oin, irritably.

"Well who's to say she doesn't? Slip it in his mead at night; he won't know what way is up or down. Done it myself many a time." He was about to crack his knuckles self-satisfyingly when Siv sprung and walloped him in the side of the head, Freyda drawing her ax beside her. "Scoundrel!" spat Freyda. "Ought to rip your jewels off and feed 'em to the shepherdess's dogs for that!" added Siv. "Hold him!" commanded Freyda. "Wake up Urdlaug. Get her sharpest knife."

Nori dove behind Dwalin but the bigger dwarf reached back and flipped him head-about-arse over his shoulder, splaying him in the path of the two angry dwarrowdams. Nori put his hands up, cowering. "Not with a lass ye boneheaded wanton! I'm… I'm… _offended _by that!" He stumbled on, choking on his words in fear. "Get me eye on some travelers with their pockets jingling in a tavern. Slip 'em a good potion with their tankards and pick their pockets when they pass out. Get myself back on the road then to the next round of sticky-fingering." Siv withdrew, her and Freyda still glaring at him the same. "Better be the only sticky-fingering you're doing," warned Freyda. Dwalin grunted in amusement.

Nori wrinkled his nose indignantly at the two and shrugged. He put his hands up in defeat. "But that's me though. Talking about _her_." He waved his hand in the direction of the watch-post.

"Her?" Freyda pushed back with disbelief. "Not to disappoint you, Master Nori, but I don't think so. Sure isn't the knavish kind like yourself, the shepherdess. Much less a defiler."

Bristling at the word, Dwalin slugged another gullet-full of something stronger than the mead. "You… are truly out of your mind on that one and over the line. Freyda is right." He gave Freyda an approving glance and she beamed. He had never called her by her name before. "Anyway," Freyda hastened to add. "She's just… kind of lonely I think. Cagey kind."

"Like someone we all know," a low voice offered after a tense silence. Freyda looked up toward Dwalin and saw his face was perked and suspicious, but when he caught her looking his ribald enthusiasm returned. "Keep the tall-folk. Give me a good strong dwarven lass with shoulders like an ox, that'll brace against me good when I'm charging. Some wrestling under the bedclothes with a capable partner is how it's done. No fun 'less it's a fair fight."

Oin was gnashing his teeth the same way he was gnashing a mix of lily-root and rue, with one eye on Siv, who was clapping her hands and roaring with delight, skirt up over her knees with strong, thick legs outstretched, in naught but a pair of thin, tattered stockings and short boots.

Balin gave another equally red-faced dwarrowdam a reassuring look, as Dwalin slurred on. _He was drunker than ever he'd been, or else he'd be over the other side of the camp watching Thorin toss and turn in his sleep. Odd how he'd never left his side until… _

Dwalin shoved a tankard into his brother's hand. _T__hey had not woken Thorin. At least there was that_, the old dwarf assured himself.

.

Gimli had been her watch-mate but the boy was so weary and achy from sitting at the reins all day over rough terrain she sent him to bed with her assurances that the night was at peace and Dwalin would soon be on. Alone, ears strained against a sound on the wind that sounded a wounded whimper. _Was it him? _Even when Dwalin and Balin were by his side he muttered in despair sometimes, in his sleep. But she could hear the distinct thump of Dwalin's laughter back in the camp. Dwalin never laughed like that when he was around Thorin. _He must have been sleeping then. Good, good. Grant him rest, Mahal._

She flexed her hand in and out, the knuckles still stiff and aching. He had kissed her and now he had made her weak once again, all the same. _Weak like he is weak down where no one can see, lonely like he is… NO! He is my king I must not-_

She was shaken back to her current reality, by Thorin's low, deep voice. "Meisar?"

She snapped around with wide eyes to face him, a gasp escaping her. He drew back, with surprising gentleness and her furrowed brow eased at him. "I am sorry. You surprised me, is all. I thought you were sleeping."

"I couldn't sleep," he mumbled. "I did not mean to scare you. I suppose I have done that oft these days past, _dunininh._" He paused, hesitantly. "In a manner of speaking," she half-whispered. His closeness was making her itch. "Have you been avoiding me purposely?" he asked suddenly.

"Of course not." Her cheeks flamed. _Liar. _

He took a seat cautiously beside her. "Perhaps I thought it wise to," she admitted. His eyes seemed to burn a hole in hers through the dark between them, close as they were now. So close she could hear his heart thumping under his clothes, feel his air in her midst. When a hand extended toward her, she did not move, only held herself stiffly as a single forefinger running down her jawline became two putting her chin up a bit toward him. "Do not blush. You are worthy of my admiration." "Your… admiration my king?"

"You defended me with your life, for one. Does that alone not make you worthy?"

"And so did you save mine." She flinched heavily. "What is it you fear so, Meisar? I can see it your eyes. You might as well grant your king the small favor of your honesty."

"How I feel when you're near me." Her voice had an unfamiliar tremor in it, as if she were on the verge of tears. But she had said so with stoutness, forthright, if fearing to utter it. He gave her a little reassuring smile. "You kissed me, Thorin, my king. I suppose it is I wonder why."

He was silent and guarded and did not answer. "Am I to believe it, my king?"

"Believe what?"

She sighed hesitantly. "Were you betrothed once? To a Firebeard? A lady with red hair?"

The flash of shock, even pain, in his eyes made her immediately regret her words, but his visage softened toward her quickly enough. "It is true." He drew his hand up toward her cheek but fell back. "A contract of marriage was made by my grandfather, between myself and a Firebeard princess from the Blue Mountains, when I was but in swaddling clothes."

"What became of her, my liege/"

"It makes no difference," he said more cagily. "I never beheld her face, nor knew her name. It would have been revealed to me when I was considered of age for the marriage to take place. Smaug arrived before that time did, and put an end to all of that." Meisar wrinkled her brows in confusion. "But she was your One?" It was only half a question, really.

He shrugged. "A dwarf may have a One, but a King has the One he is given, and must make do. Oft they are content enough in marriage. I had good examples in my father and grandfather. Both loved their wives deeply."

"I had the impression that it was of a greater loss, is all."

"Not so, compared to others. What does it matter anyway?" His eyes grew sad. "A king without a kingdom is no match even for a Firebeard."

She shrugged, relieved but not really. One heaviness of mind had only been replaced by another. "I… only suppose I wonder why it was you sought my company. That would have explained it." She was quivering finely all over. "If you are looking for a Firebeard princess in me, I'm afraid you'll be disappointed."

"I am not looking for a princess."

"Then what are you looking for?" She shivered away from his touch, no matter how great the pleasure was it gave her. "You are shaking."

"I am fine," Meisar answered more assuredly this time, but he could feel her trembling still.

"It frightens you that I have grown fond of you?"

His hands cupped and braced her upper arms, a gentle yet commanding hold. She studied him, his heavy brow and his broad, sturdy shoulders and long hair. His handsome features were pleasing to her eye, if there was something oddly stimulating about his mannerisms too, burdened and wary as they were. He was too much like her. Maybe it comforted her. She could not say.

"Well?" His face had an interrogative impatience to it. A whimper half-formed on her lips. "It confounds me slightly," she confessed with earnest timidity peppering her voice, which was so harsh on an ordinary day, reduced to the mewl of a frightened girl. "I have only to offer you my loyalty, and my company, if that is what you wish from me," she murmured lowly. His tense gaze seemed unfulfilled by that answer. "If it is some affection you hold for me, I am honored my liege."

"I have grown to want for your company," he confessed quietly. His vulnerability was raising the hairs on the back of her neck, like a stag's might in the path of an unseen bow. "My company?" She repeated it with a dream-like distance.

"Yes. And that is so odd to think?"

"It is a strange thing to imagine, yes, that I am…and to you no less." "Why?" His eyes bore deep. _Did he want her to say it?_

"You have been through so great of grief. Does it cloud your judgment, I fear."

"Seems a convenient explanation for everything, doesn't it?" he seethed back at her. "My grief, my gold-madness, my year in the Shire with the Halflings playing at dead. As if I had a choice. Is that all there is to me?"

"Of course not," she replied, wounded. His expression seemed to regret himself. "You are correct that I have been terribly aggrieved. I have lost much. But can I not find comfort in one who has held my confidence, and shielded my life with her own? Still you think it strange?"

"_Mahal_! You wake in the night and come here to me, seeking… seeking… _this_. I, a woman who has shown herself to be no comforter, and you confide more in myself I think than you do even in Dwalin, the closest you have to a brother now. And he worries for you so."

"I cannot very well cleave to his side in the night."

"Then it is more than comfort, isn't it?"

"Yes. It is." The way he moved then, it seemed a weight had been lifted from his shoulders in the literalist of ways. Yet he seemed melancholy still. And why shouldn't he, she thought. It had struck her suddenly with a pang of urgency, something inside her needing to move, _extend_. A sense of benevolence toward him grew, more than she had ever felt for anybody, and tried to think back upon those who had been as close to her in life as this foreign, melancholy king was now, and realized that there were none.

An unfamiliar quake made a tremor through her body, holding herself at length from him. "You kissed me, my king. You kissed me…"

While she said no more, her eyes lifted to his slowly and his held the strong bearing of her gaze. The trembling of her hand as his own shifted haltingly along the ground between them, coming to brush lightly over the tops of her fingers with his own, said everything.

.

"Brother, please," scolded Balin finally, flustered, storing his thoughts for a better time. "You've not the know-how to say what you'd do… under the blankets." Dwalin retreated, wordless and scowling. "Never even kissed a lass, have ye Mister Dwalin? Doubt it," Donbur teased, jumping on the opportunity. Freyda's eyes prickled as she caught Dwalin's shift in her direction, self-consciously.

"You'll stop talking if ye knew what we good fer ye, like any lass would come near the likes of yer bubbly arse," retorted Dwalin finally. "I might have a One!" Donbur whined. "You had a One. You ate her." The dwarves laughed and Dwalin kept the momentum going against Donbur's smug nonchalant brush-off. "Sure did taste mighty fine, that she-pig ye slaughtered for the road back in Ered Luin!" Dwalin's voice surged upward in a roar of laughter. Donbur plucked another sausage off the stick, biting his fingers in the process as they were shaped quite the same.

"If it is a bonny stout lass is what ye fancy so, what's the problem with the king having an eye on one? Dwalin's face seemed to darken worriedly again. He drank some more. Donbur munched another sausage stupidly. "Nice-sized, I say, the shepherdess. Good for the king if he fancies her. Seek her hand myself I would if she weren't so close to kin. She's awful nice once you get to know her. Da was sad when she left."

Dwalin smacked him upside his head. "She has as much use for you as your mother does your father."

Donbur shrugged off the insult, skewered another sausage. "Save some for the rest of us," whined Nori.

"In that case, I should have her cook for me. I prefer my meat well-done."

"Yer meat is still breathing, boy," Dwalin snorted.

"Strangely, Mister Dwalin, your mother said the same thing not long ago. But she cooked it nicely for sure."

Dwalin slapped him upside his expanse of chins and that was the end of that.

Balin winced and Bofur entered the fray, gently, putting a comforting hand out to Donbur's shoulder. "Leave the lad be," he chided. "Don't let him bother you so, nephew. You're a fine lad and as good a cook as my brother. Mayhap someday a fine fat-bottomed lass will come waltzing to yer supper table and into yer heart."

"Isn't that the way to someone's heart, through their stomach?" trumpeted Donbur. Dwalin glared at the two of them, curling his lip at such wanton optimism; Bofur, as usual, ignored him. "As for the other small matter… if it is, it is. And if it is, it is a good thing," Bofur tried settled the matter finally. Meisar was a fine lass, righteous at heart if not particularly charming. He hoped Thorin, of all people Thorin, might find light in her.

"Would ye like my scone, Mister Dwalin? I'm right stuffed," Freyda offered. Dwalin seized and snarfed the blueberry scone and rubbed a huge tattooed hand on Freyda's head in thanks. "Very good lass. Very good." She reached and patted his hand back, a twinkle about her that Dwalin was oblivious to and Balin was smiling amusedly at.

"And just what are you two doing here with the menfolk? Listening to all this dastardly talk?" Eda stomped through the gathering dispiritedly, Emli on her tail and equally miffed. The fire was still going, the dwarves still rambling on bawdily. "Can't sleep with all this commotion," Emli's head jerked around at the sound of two more female giggles. Lulia and Virta had been hiding in the shrub just off the fire. "You two go off to bed before your sister sees you here. She's stirring over there from all the bedlam." Emli shooed the girls off, who didn't need much more warning than that, and she gave Freyda and Siv a good stern look. "Sound like a bunch of ruffians in a whorehouse. Act like dwarves!"

Nori belched ferociously. "There, that dwarvish enough for you, Missus Gloin?!" Emli's faced puffed out indignantly. "I have a name of my own, scoundrel." Eda snapped.

"Mine's Nori by the way."

"Very funny, very funny," Eda raised her hands and waved them once irritably before they came to rest smartly again on her hips. "All the potions I have for the morning headache after drink are gone. See how funny you all find it tomorrow morning." Dwalin made a low rumbling sound. "Come on lass." He patted Freyda's shoulder. "Get me some of that Southron swill ye call coffee. We've got watch."

.

"Rats!"

Meisar pulled away suddenly from their nearness and yelped as Freyda and Dwalin came barreling through to the watch post. Freyda fell forward as one of Meisar's hounds got under her feet. Dwalin caught her in one arm. A quick glance into her eyes was all he gave her in acknowledgement before it shifted irritably to the hounds. They'd been nesting behind the rock and now came and clung about the shepherdess's feet. "Rats with fur," grumbled Dwalin. The hounds mumbled at him, hurt. "Unless you wish to go sniffing orcs in the dirt yourself Mister Dwalin, better get used to these furry rats under your feet."

"Keep 'em under yours and I'll be happy, lass." Dwalin nudged Thorin off of the earthen seat. "Get some sleep, my king. Not even on watch, were ye?" His brows furrowed at Meisar.

"Fair enough. Goodnight," Thorin replied quickly. "Save my spot. I'll be along soon enough," Dwalin said. His eyes were on Meisar as if he could read her heart already like moon runes.

III

When she went to rouse them in the morning, half did not wake at all, not even with a swift kick in the hindquarters or a violent shake or two. An empty barrel of ale that had been full at supper sat with its stopper eyeing the lumps of drunken dwarves accusingly. Both Emli and Eda had lamented the situation to her so pitiably she rightly felt a need to disappear for a spell. A patch of woods and a long-abandoned orchard half a league along their route beckoned her. She could smell apples, fall-fruit and icy wind on the air.

Soon, she had foraged berries, a sack of mushrooms, and a heavy pail of not-yet-ripe apples, the orchard though long-abandoned, still fruitful. Now she sat quietly over a rock, cleaning a rabbit skin. Footsteps behind her came heavy, but tentative. She knew them by now, and her heart was warm suddenly, her head hot. "You have not accompanied me on these adventures for many days now my king." She kept to her task and didn't look up at him. Thorin rumbled at her, ruefully. "Surely you can understand, Meisar…"

"I am glad for your company again my king. I have missed it, truly." She stopped as he came around to her. Her eyes were warm and she was illuminated serenely under the morning sun. "The dwarves are awake I hope?"

"They are coming to life."

"And you prefer my company to them whining of headaches?"

"I came because I wanted to give you this," he took her hand and pressed a flat, polished stone into her palm, folded her fingers gently around it. "A talisman," she said, opening her fingers and examining the stone as he looked on with eager, almost timid eyes. "It shows fine craftsmanship for such a crude canvas. It is beautiful."

"I carved it. For you." She drew her fingers over the smooth, meticulous groves of the dwarvish runes. They were tingling, and it was not alleviated by his fingers suddenly brushing up against hers as he took the stone from her. One thick finger moved over the first rune. "It means guide," he explained.

"Appropriate. And this one?"

"Honor. Loyalty, that one." She flipped the stone over to see another one, alone on the back. "And this, my king?"

"Beauty." Her chest tightened and she stared up into his eyes, suspended in a wonderment she could not process. It made her feet numb, her knees weak and her head about to spin off its axis. Something inside her clenched, not quite in her belly but lower, and deep, deep inside. It rose and made her throat tighten against what might have been tears.

"It is a gift of thanks, my lady. For your… discretion. Yesterday." Her heavy eyes cast themselves almost too willingly downward. "The depth of your sorrow is daunting to me my king." He took her hand gently in his. "I did not mean to crush you so, for them." His callused fingertips whispered between the ridges of her finger-bones.

"It is a lovely well-thought gift, my king. I shall cherish it always." She bit her lip against a rising swell in her throat. "Are you alright, Meisar?"

When she wanted to answer, only a squeaking sound came out. She felt like a small girl, a blushing maid. When the words finally came, rushed, they were stilted. "Fine. Just a tad overwhelmed. No one's ever really given me such a gift, and from a king, I… I am overwhelmed is all." She smiled with her eyes at the ground, the ducts in the corners starting to sting. The worst was the threat of tears; she bit her lip and when she stopped it was bloody, Thorin wiping away the blood with his thumb. "You must not feel shame, or fear, for any of this." He cupped her by sides of her neck, his hands so rough but so safe, so familiar and warm, his thumbs at her cheek. "Beauty?" she whispered, whether it was a question even she herself could be sure.

"Beauty," he confirmed, quietly. She opened her eyes and found that his were silent and begging. "Might I kiss you again?"

"Yes. Yes…"

Her eyes slid closed, and he watched the twitch and then the hesitant parting of her lips. His head went forth to claim her lips and fumbled back, when she opened her eyes and flinched. Their noses bumped twice before his mouth was on hers again, with eager purpose. His lips were thin and severe but to kiss them was to make them swell in the slightest. How deeply those lips needed to be kissed she had not conceived of until hers were on them a second time, the tip of her tongue skimming his bottom one. Though his mouth was slim and sparse his lips were warm and cushioned with wet heat when he kissed. Her lips parted shyly again and she felt his tongue slip along hers for a lingering taste, the touch of his mouth thoughtful yet intense. He _must have been_ starving she thought. Had he even been with a woman before, lain with or even kissed? The hungry motions of his tongue seemed to belie some practice, at least with his mouth. She twitched at the friction of his beard against her skin, letting her tongue find his and explore tentatively, none too clumsy for its lack of practice.

The sensation was so acute to him it could have been a razor dragged over it the same. Her own were full and slightly chapped, all too pink for her complexion, and as they drew away from Thorin's, positively rosy. When his lips had left hers, she saw dark spots peppering the peripherals of her vision. She licked her lips and tasted his foreignness on them, savored the smoky tang of it. He leaned and kissed the freckled bridge of her nose. "There is much to you, my king. I know that. And there is much good in you. I see it." She swallowed a gullet full of air. She could have choked over the words that were caught in her throat, drowning in his eyes again. They paralyzed all of her being like a poisonous spider. _What will become of us now?_

He brought her close and kissed her head, murmuring something in Khuzdul against her hair, warming her scalp with his breath. "I cannot explain this," he sighed weightily. "It simply is, my lady."

"Nor can I, but…" "But what?"

"Your company and your… affections, my king, are…"

"Are what?" he murmured gently into her hair again.

"I am… well I suppose I am… _Isrej."_

"_Isrej,"_ he repeated in a content murmur.

_Not So Alone._

IV

By mid-afternoon her own exhaustion had begun to make her feel heavy all over. Hegi sat behind her on Jenny, clasping about her waist and making nicking sounds at the irritable pony below them. When she dug a pair of greedy fingers into the tobacco pouch at Meisar's waist, she smacked her hand away, irritably. "You smell of gunpowder, Hegi. When did you change your clothes or wash your face last?" she muttered in Khuzdul. Hegi's coal-blackened fingers took a pinch of tobacco and stuffed it into her pipe, defiantly. "Don't be lighting any pipes in my midst!"

Hegi smirked wildly in response. She buried her face into the back of Meisar's head and took a deep breath of her hair. "What in all of Arda are you doing, you madwoman?" Hegi laughed again, her unhinged grunting laugh. "Your hair smells of pipe-weed and it's not yours," she garbled again in Khuzdul. "Pipe-weed and someone else's breath." Her laugh rose into a screeching cackle. Meisar near halted the pony, mouth shot wide open. The other dwarrowdams riding before them were at a not-so-comfortable distance and Emli had the ears of a fox. "Another word and you'll be walking."

"You're… _on edge,"_ Brynja said pointedly. Meisar snapped forward again as Brynja fell back to ride beside her. Meisar glared a bit toward her. "Shouldn't I be? If the past weeks have been any indication?" To her eternal gratitude, Hegi was just cackling stupidly again.

"Are you alright? I've heard rumors." "Brynja, please-"

"Not bad ones though," she chirped.

"Enough with rumors. Believe what you see and nothing more," Meisar repeated, remembering Thorin's own words. Hegi tugged on her long plait and anchored her face to her head again, laughing and smelling her hair. Brynja looked utterly confused at least. "Bedlamite she is. Don't pay her any heed." She jammed her whole body backward at Hegi, nearly knocking her from the pony.

"Oh you snap at old Hegi so. She is harmless," chided Brynja. She patted Hegi's hand from over her pony and the dwarrowdam winked slyly back at her and jerked her head toward Meisar, only seeming to confuse Brynja more. Brynja smiled muddily. "Only trying to be nice in her way, _dunininh."_

Her naïveté was suddenly obnoxious to her. "Trying to stop her from striking a pipe is all, Brynja. Light a match she will and our ashes will be raining down on Rivendell." She glared edgily at Hegi. "A miner knows better-"

Brynja shrieked fast as Meisar stopped mid-sentence and made a sound like a bullfrog in a swamp, halting her pony harshly. Jenny screeched, and the shepherdess's eyes were as big as saucers. "My lady?" said Brynja fearfully. "What is it?"

"Rivendell!" Meisar keened. "Oh _Mahal_, we are going in the wrong direction!"


	16. IN PLACES DEEP WHERE DARK THINGS SLEEP

He was not angry. Nor was Dwalin even. They had sat that evening around the cook-fire, silently, after she had broken the news, and the two of them, Thorin and Dwalin, shrugged it off, to her relief, but even greater confusion. Dwalin had patted her shoulder and the look Thorin had given him was like a knife when his huge, tattooed palm made contact. "The longer I can avoid the company of elves, the better," Dwalin had grumbled, forgivingly.

"Hear they've got healing powers not like ours," Eda said. She finished re-dressing Dwalin's arm and felt Meisar's forehead. "A wee hot. Told you to rest, lass. You get run down, this is what happens."

"I feel fine," she assured Eda. "It's not a fever." Her eyes raised up shiftily toward Thorin, avoiding his equally unsteady gaze. "I'm going for a walk," she announced briskly.

"Might I accompany you, _dunininh?_" Thorin asked quietly.

She curtsied, stiffly. "Of course, my king."

Nori and Dori turned to each other silently and looked to Dwalin for help, supposing if Dwalin suspected ill he would have drawn the king away. He did not- not this time. It had been so long since Dwalin had seen him so… unburdened.

.

"I thought you would be cross with me," she said quietly after a long silence.

"I am not."

He walked on with his face held stiffly ahead of them. She continued. "We could continue to the mountains, though it is a longer tread than if we turned back for Rivendell and-"

"Have I distracted you so in your purpose?" he interjected.

"My king?"

"That you go three days in the wrong direction?" he questioned. He turned to her and took both of her hands in his.

The apples in her cheeks were blushing. He cupped her face with a certain intensity about his touch, thumbs sweeping over the flushed peaks of her cheekbones. "You would be fool to think that you are _not _the cause."

Thorin's face stiffened at the words. An ache formed in his chest, low and tight. He was about to leave when he felt the woman's hand on his, the warmth of her skin on the back of his hand, threading into his fingers with an uncanny desperation, her warm palm against his own.

"Don't go…"

"Meisar," Thorin said breathily. He squeezed her hand harder, took her fingers and threaded them through his own and held tight in a heavy grip that was full of need. He brought his hand up to touch her face again, thumb brushing lightly over her cheekbone, her arms coming to cling nervously around his forearm. He leaned his forehead to hers. He felt heavy, so heavy against her, as if a great boulder lay beneath his forehead. His nose, so harsh and prominent, pushed lightly into the groove between her nose and the apple of her cheek.

"Did I not promise to protect you?" she questioned, shifting her head ever so slightly to feel the rough of his beard rub along the naked skin of her face.

_O what have I woken up in me? (A being that fire could not kill in a black arrow's reach)__  
_

"And you still think I need it?" he asked, his tone a bit darker, his grip tightening.

_A black arrow or blue eyes._

She pulled back and stared heavily into his eyes. "Have I not been forthright in telling you so, when you asked that I speak freely?"

"I'll make you captain of Erebor's guard then. That'll be a sight," he smirked darkly. She pulled back from him and crossed her arms.

"Comforted then. Is that a better word?"

"The meaning is much the same, isn't it?"

"And is that the worst thing, my lord?"

"No." He moved and kissed her swiftly, deep and thrusting. His mouth was hot and tasted of smoke and ale. He kissed messily for a king but not for a dwarf, or one who had not kissed a woman for some time, if at all. His mouth was hard and frenzied on hers, and his beard scraped her cheek and left a brush of pink skin there. He rumbled a groan into her, the feel of a woman's mouth on his, all heat and sweet nectar, foreign, exhilarating.

There was a constant smokiness about his lips, a primal, masculine essence about his taste. She pressed her tongue lightly past his lips and he pulled away.

"I am sorry. I didn't…" When they touched his face he could feel her hands were callused and worked like his, and yet they were tender, so light and hesitant.

He smiled, serenely and turned his head to place a soft kiss in her palm, the roughness of his beard there stirring her and making her sigh from deep in her throat. "Please, do not be sorry. There is enough to be sorry for in this world. You are the last that should be."

.

"I thought he'd react differently," Balin remarked, when they were both gone, and it was just him, and Dwalin. Dwalin's eyes squinted and his forehead scrunched in thought. He gave his brother a suspicious look.

Balin sighed. "He's sporting a different mood. I can't quite figure it out. But these have been strange days the last."

"You don't think?" Dwalin asked, daring not to say it aloud in a better way.

"Three days off the road from Rivendell. The lady is a guide with some skill," pondered Balin aloud. He had read something in the wordless glances between them, but it might as well have been in Elvish. A tenseness, that he had only ever seen the likes of once before.

II

"Do you think I've broad shoulders, Meisar?" Freyda asked disarmingly. In her furs, she was undoubtedly broad. Furs and a coat of mail that came near to her knees and to her elbows the same glinted sharply in the midday sun.

The two dwarrowdams walked along the bumpy terrain, the dwarves at their midday meal having made a brief stop.

"Well?" she asked again. Her face, which had been so fierce to look upon, set mouth and snarling blue-green eyes, was imbued with the self-consciousness of a maid on the cusp of womanhood. "You are a dwarf. Of course you do." Freyda's vulnerability amused her, not like Thorin's frightened her.

"Yes, but even for a dwarf, do you think?" "She shed her furs and flexed her arms in the reflection of the pond. "Freyda, what is on your mind? Is it Mister Dwalin again?"

She looked at her feet and grinned, bashfully. "Drunken rambling about the campfire is all." "Talking mighty clear about the kind of lass he'd want warming his bed. Get the impression he's not had one before." Meisar gave a practiced smile. "And where would have? He hardly seems like the romantic kind."

"Well, we're not sprung out of stone, are we?" inquired Freyda earnestly.

"In the world of men, they might say yes."

Freyda chewed her lip. "A strong woman, big-shouldered, who can hold her own against him. That's what he said. Drink makes 'em tell exactly what's on their heart, ye know. Remember that day at the water when we were sparring?" She turned her face to one side and examined it in the still pool, fluffed at the pale hair at her jawline.

"Of course. He seemed quite impressed," Meisar conceded, her placidly starting to chafe.

Freyda spun around. "Well he's found that lass! Why can't he see it?"

"You certainly can hold your own, Freyda."

For a moment Freyda seemed to swoon. She sat herself heavily upon a nearby rock, with a dreaminess coming over the usually bellicose pools of her eyes. "Can't stop thinking about him. Want those big tattooed hands on me. I dream about it sometimes."

_If only you knew what my dreams were like, Freyda. Or his…_

"Feelings make dwarves do strange things, Freyda." She took a seat beside her cautiously.

"You're acting a queer fish yourself. The dwarves are nattering ye know, about… things."

"I have much on my mind," protested Meisar.

"Three days off course. I'm sure ye do, lass. I'm sure ye do."

"Freyda…"

Nori's theories had filtered up to her, via the nattering grapevine made by the dwarrowdams. She didn't know whether to be frightened or amused or-

Freyda twisted one of her braids on her finger nervously. "If the king… trusts you with things… can you coax him sometime, about Mister Dwalin, ye know? If he says anything about me."

She exhaled, with a bit of relief. "Of course, Freyda. I would be glad to."

III

In the evening before bed Thorin made small talk with Emli and her son. He was coming around more, his isolation less than constant, since the day they had met on the road to Bree.

"Well I would say your friendship has done him well, my lady," remarked Emli coming around from behind her, her smile purposeful as always. The ears of a fox and the eyes of a hawk, Gimli would boast of himself, but it was his mother who had earned that motto, truly.

"I suppose," Meisar noted, innocuously as possible.

Emli peered down at her, arms folded across her chest. "I think there is more to you than you let on," she said, cryptically, and turned as daintily on her heel as she had come, and walked away. Emli always had the last word.

"Isn't that most of us?" responded Meisar, but Emli was already out of earshot.

_Or not_ she mused silent, sarcastic and peering over her cloak toward Emli. Another set of eyes on her was all she needed, and the eyes of a hawk no less.

.

She was woken in the middle of the night by a fur being placed over her. She woke and gasped into the darkness, only to have her sudden shock soothed by a warm, callused hand brushing her cheek.

"You were shivering. Are you sure you are past a fever's chance?" the low familiar voice rumbled beside her. She tugged the fur up around her shoulders sleepily against the cool night, laid supine in her bedroll as she was, and quickly realized it was his own.

"What are you doing here, my king?" she half-hissed. She squinted at every movement of the bedrolls around them.

"I have been laying just there all night," he said, pointing to a nearby space that was empty now. "Your chattering woke me."

She hugged the fur ever more tightly over her shoulders, like armor. "Perhaps I am, then. Cold. I didn't notice."

"Might we share warmth again then?"

She nodded yes, feeling all too hot now. He laid his bedding out quietly beside her, set his ax and his great sword to the side. Who was this dwarf? This king? Who clasped her hand and had kissed her, and who desired her lay at his side in the night now? She pondered to herself, anxiously. She had already found a part of him unlike the infallible, stubborn dwarf she had imagined, controlled and bitter and melancholy. But now he seemed so very wanting, vulnerable even, and it frightened her a bit. She craned her head up slowly to look about. Each of the dwarves were asleep, deep asleep if their snores made any indication of it. She resisted undulating toward the furnace heat of him, as her body ached to draw close to him and sink into his warmth. Wordlessly, she scooted herself with her bedroll about her, his hand on her belly coming to rest firmly, drawing her to his side.

His consummate, even shy, tenderness disarmed her so when they lay side-by-side. It had not perturbed her so much as the wounded sounds he made in his sleep. _Protect and serve and comfort my king. Hurmul. _

Her honor in that matter had been so unceremoniously discarded it seemed. She wanted so badly to kiss him and never stop, to taste the brine of his skin. To bury her fingers into his long hair and caress the dark heavy locks. And take in his scent, a dark and earthy scent, mingling with light sweat, but not unpleasant in the least. To hold him, cleave to him utterly. Shyly then she rolled to face him, his hand on her hip commanding a steady grasp, drawing her closer. It was not quite terror in her eyes that he beheld in the dim light of the fire, no. It was not fear of any kind that he had ever seen.

It was a shyness, a timid curiosity that hurt her deep in a place inside she had never known could ache like it did. And it would not stop hurting until… _until what_?

She reached out and ran the tip of her finger over his bearded chin. She looked so frightened when she touched him, as if he would rebuke her for it. She could feel the effervescent rumble as he sighed at the contact. In avertedly, the tip of her nose brushed against his. Hers was short and stubborn, with a dwarvish bridge. His was perfectly angled in a harsh, prominent way, and it was the most striking part of his face she thought, more so even than those eyes. Eyes that she could perceive the intensity of even in the dark of night, so close to her, and yet so far.

He took her into his arms again and pressed her tightly to him. "It is a peaceful thing to hold you," he murmured softly.

"Shh… they will hear us. If they see us, my king…" she breathed.

He nodded into her hair, caring not for it. It had been long, so long, since he had known a woman's closeness. He took in Meisar's earthy, natural scent. Her hair smelled of rain, and her skin. He tasted her skin, the earth and salt of it, something natural and primal and _female. _She intoxicated him to his core.

"I will leave you before dawn, I promise."

She stirred lightly against him, overcome with both her need and his, a sensation that left her heady. Thorin Oakenshield was not a man to become intoxicated by anything, not even ale. A burdened, sometimes officious man, Meisar had always pictured him as cold and distant, if especially noble in his countenance. And that he was to most. But Meisar…

He closed his eyes and tried to forget and held her. Took in the sweetgrass and heady scent of her hair. Like Kili's after he had run thru a field in the morning, and rushed in to wake him. But she was not Kili, that sweet carefree boy with the impish grin; she was Meisar, the least of all carefree. But she was comfort; something that lay beneath her surface startled and made him weak. When he held her like he did now, her head pressed on his shoulder, her arms cautiously folded up against his chest, he was protecting something. Guarding her heart as if it were his own. Under the exterior, she, like everything he had ever cared for, could be broken.

_She was not Kili, or Fili, or his kin. She was…_

He tugged her head lightly upward to meet her lips in the dark.

She responded with her tongue in kind. Thorin's taste- a mix of smoke, ale and something vague and masculine- was strangely intoxicating to her. And the hot breath that poured across her cheeks from his nostrils when he would not stop kissing her even to break for breath. It was too overwhelming, too _wonderful _a sensation to deny, and she surrendered to it utterly. He caught her bottom lip stubbornly, the thrust of his tongue deliberate and rough. Meisar let him devour her, suckling and nipping until she was sure she would wake up swollen and purple. Ripples of heat coursed between her legs, a heady feeling all over. When he relented eager for breath, she then caught his lip, pushing teeth into it gently, drawing a harsh groan from him. Her fist wound in his long hair challenging him to surrender first. He hissed against her and freed her lips from his, and pulled her head back by the root of her hair, beard rasping over her neck as he teased her there with a dark gaze thrown up at her daring her to make a sound. Teeth grazed over the base of her throat, catching a small fold of skin and nipping at it. His kiss burned over the pulsating flesh, making her squirm. He did not like being bested at this particular game.

"Sleep well, Meisar," he said gruffly. He kissed her forehead curtly and turned over to sleep.

.

He woke drenched to the skin in the cold sweat of night.

"Bad dreams, my lord?" he heard a voice hum quietly.

She sighed. "We all get them sometimes…"

His head was cradled on her knee as he thrashed in his sleep, stifling his anguished moans against her. This unintended humbling burned at him, a humiliation however slight. His dreams were his own. Thorin Oakenshield did not wail and gnash his teeth in fitful sleep for phantoms, nor ghosts.

She took her water skin, poured a cool stream on the end of her cloak and dabbed at his brow. For her stony disposition, there was a tenderness in her hands, the way she wiped the sweat from his face.

"This very earth we lay upon has drunk so many tears that none will ever see," Meisar sighed with deep sadness into the night. Thorin tensed against her. "It keeps its secrets well and so do I."

She bent and quietly kissed his forehead. "You shall tell me sometime of happier days. I should like to see you smile."

IV

She excused herself for watch quietly the next evening, hoping none would realize she was early for it, and found Thorin waiting where he said he would be. His and Dwalin's watches had left them sleeping in shifts and Dwalin was out like a rock in the camp, for once. They were safe, safe and alone, if only for a spell.

He bent his head to kiss her clasped hand, a whisper of a kiss on the knuckles that tickled from his beard.

"Sit."

He puts his arms out for her. She moved, quavering to him, his big hands coming around to settle at the small of her back, so gingerly, but weighing on her like boulders. She felt the globes of her bottom twitch in want of something she had never felt before and could not fathom. Before her knees could give way from beneath her he pulled her to sit upon his knee.

His hands remained clasped at the small of her back, steadying her upon his knee, anchoring her there.

"I am sorry I was short with you last night. I did not mean it."

"I forgive you." Desire stirred slowly and then ripped over her. She placed her arms about his broad shoulders and his moved from the small of her back to stroke the side of her neck, shyly. His fingertips left a trail of goose-flesh in their wake, caressing first the round of her ear, her jaw, and then return to settle upon her neck.

"You have my promise still my king, that I will keep your confidence in all matters." That earnest, almost noble, expression returned to her face for a moment, stolid and detached. The memory of the previous night, the cold stickiness of his skin and the tenderness of her hands on his head, stroking, the softness of her lap beneath him, made his head feel heavy and it dipped lightly against her. Her fingers trailed along the edge of his beard where it met the naked skin of his cheek, a most tender exploration. "Let me kiss you," he said huskily.

Her lips drew in a shy, slight pucker. The heavy bristle of beard brushed lightly into the dip between her nose and top lip. The tip of her nose pressed lightly into the roughage of the beard above his lip. He brushed another light, faltering kiss against the not-so-innocuous space.

"You are unfamiliar with these things?" he inquired, the heat behind his words ill-concealed. Her hand stroked timidly over his hair. Thorin's was so long and dark, thick and virile, the feel of it not quite like silk but not coarse either.

His eyes got a hungry, dark gleam to them when she nodded yes quietly. But his serene smile softened his visage then, a thick finger tucking a lock of hair loosened from her braid behind her ear.

"And are you, my king… unfamiliar?"

He avoided her question with a small smile, head bowed a bit. "We will learn… together."

"There is something growing between us, my king. I think I should fear it more than I do," she admitted, darkly. _You have woken something up in me, that is swallowing me whole, but there are no words to tell you so._

"No. I am quite tired of fear," he growled.

"Then you shall not fear, my king, and I will try not to." She took him then, smoky-mouthed and coarse-bearded, to embrace again together. His kiss was tender and lingering now, not tense and claiming, savage like it had tended to be.

"You kiss with such tenderness Thorin Oakenshield." She drew a hesitant hand over his head, finding his temple plait, running her fingers over it until she reached the clasp and rolled it nervously between her thumb and forefinger.

"And that surprises you?"

"You are not a tender kind."

"Am I not?" He kissed her again tugging on her bottom lip with his teeth, drawing her it into his mouth and suckling heatedly at it.

"Tell me, am I the first?"

"Bofur!" she gasped suddenly. _Bofur_ burned in Thorin's mind. How could he…?

"Bof-" he started to glower.

Meisar skittered off his knee and scolded the intruding party. "Bofur! You're not on watch for another hour!"


	17. In ELDER DAYS BEFORE THE FALL

"You did not see anything last night, Bofur."

Bofur set down his whittling and turned around. Meisar placed an unthreatening hand on his shoulder from behind. She had held out a mince pie to him, his favorite.

"There is no need to bribe me, Meisar," he assured her, looking into her eyes when he did. Liars never looked into someone's eyes she was always told, and it relieved her some but not much.

"It is a good thing, my lady," he assured when he had swallowed the last bit and brushed the crumbs from his tunic. In scarcely three bites, the pie was gone.

"Is it?" Meisar sighed delicately and avoided Bofur's curious eyes.

"Do you have feelings for him, Meisar?" Bofur prodded gently.

"Feelings? I dare ask, what are those?" Meisar chuckled self-deprecating. Bofur prickled inside at the somberness underneath it all.

"Oh Meisar, sweet lass," he laughed consolingly. "You will know it when you feel it. One simply does."

Meisar looked into his eyes half-seriously. "What does it feel like?"

Bofur sighed and thought on the matter briefly. "It… it… tingles."

.

Foothills leagues ahead lay alternately forested and buttressed in sharp rises of stone. Drawing ever nearer to well-guarded Elvish lands, orcs and rogues among men were rarer. Still, Meisar took the hounds and left quietly ahead of the awakening caravan. She would need to find a suitable path for the wagons before they could get on their way.

_Chastise me, Mahal, indeed you have_, she mulled silently.

"Meisar..."

The voice came unexpected and her dogs turned and the hair on their backs and hindquarters bristled. "Hush," she soothed; she did her clumsy little curtsy to Thorin.

He put his hands upon her shoulders and pulled her upward to look into his eyes, brush a kiss against her forehead. The three hounds scratched at her boots and made runs in the thinning fabric of her double-layered breeches. "Do these curs follow you everywhere?" he rumbled huskily into her hair.

"Just as you do, my king." She allowed herself to smile just a little bit at his warmth so close to her.

"By all means, continue with your duties," he said. She walked ahead but he held ardently to her hand, tugging it back, and kissed lingeringly at the backs of her fingers.

"My king, we must be cautious," she urged helplessly. He sat on a fallen log and wrapped thick fingers around her wrist and raised it to his lips, kissing desperately at the exposed skin. Her vambraces shed, he pushed up the sleeve of her tunic little by little. Lips, coarsened by bristles of his beard, pressed to the tender, warming flesh and he murmured something in Khuzdul that she did not understand.

_Go about my duties indeed. Oh my king, my king… now what could they be?_

"You've escaped Dwalin I see?" He stood and wrapped his arms around her determinedly.

"He is sleeping, my lady." She nodded; her armed curled up in front of her at her chest as Thorin embraced her. His palm curled lightly about the side of her neck, fingertips in her hair and at her jawline. "I crave but a moment with you before we set out."

_Could he feel her wanting? _The sudden heat of her skin prickling against his touch. His thumb swept over her broad cheekbone and

"My king…" She went unresisting, arms uncurling to spread out and follow the patterns on his sleeveless outer coat up to his shoulders, wrap her arms tight about them, feeling how solid he was, how determined.

A woman's bare touch was not wholly unknown to him. But she was, her tender curiosity. "Does this please you?" he murmured.

"Yes," her warm breath and soft, beardless cheek nodded quietly against his own.

He embraced his mouth to hers, how pink and tart it was inside, like a barely-ripe fruit. He plunged his tongue deeper into her and made her gasp. "_Sanzigil_," he growled. His hold on her tightened ardently. He pulled his lips from hers and made her gasp against the sudden emptiness, growled that word again, lower, darker. Her eyes flickered open to see his were blown and craving.

"_Sanzigil!" _His lips crushed to hers again. Her heart was in her chest again and it was beating a warning.

"There ye are!" a woman's voice suddenly boomed. Thorin bit on her lip and she cried out in sudden shock, Thorin spinning around on his heels to see Bofur and Brynja hand in hand and neither looking surprised at the sight that beheld them.

"What in _Mahal's _good name are you two doing? Bofur, you swore!" Meisar sucked at her swollen bottom lip irritably.

"Ye think I didn't know?" Brynja squeezed Bofur's arm affectionately. Bofur shrugged against Thorin's unhappy glare. "Do you think mince pies are easy to wrangle from Urdlaug these days?" Thorin seethed at him.

"You too!?" Meisar stood gape-mouthed at Thorin.

"He does need to be bribed apparently, and for what?" Thorin's narrowed eyes accused Bofur and begged Brynja's silence simultaneously.

"He didn't tell me anything. I figured it out and he didn't deny it," smiled Brynja. Thorin hefted an annoyed glare at the two of them.

"You will keep your silence then, the two of you," insisted Meisar.

"Of course. We can keep secrets as well as any dwarf, not from each other so well. We are one now, after all."

They walked back to the caravan together. Meisar could feel Brynja's eyes studying her from behind, with some purpose.

Thorin glanced over his shoulder to see Dwalin's thousand yard stare landing squarely on him from across the camp. He excused himself wordlessly, leaving her alone with Bofur and Brynja. "Come to our wagon and help us get the ponies saddled," Brynja said invitingly.

"He has kissed you now more than once but he has not yet braided your hair?" questioned Brynja when they had gone to her wagon and she was pulling the saddle out of the back. She set the saddle on her pony and stroked the braid at her temple, clasped in a little stone bead Bofur had carved. "He braided this in my hair the day we met on the road west of Bree. It was meant to be that he would return to me. I accepted his hand for a proper courtship without a second thought." She rubbed her nose lovingly to Bofur's.

"You are fortunate to have each other," Meisar said sadly.

"Haven't you something yourself?" prodded Brynja. "Never heard of Thorin Oakenshield snogging a lass, not ever. You must be something to him."

_Something to him. Sanzigil. Yes, indeed._

"You would have to ask him."

"And is he the same to you?" Brynja challenged.

_He is to me unlike gold or gem or mithril. And I to him without a braid but a whore… a precious-gem of a whore._

"And just what are you three going on about?" Emli strode in self-importantly as always, smiling crisply.

Brynja's eyes went big at the sight of her. "Nothing Emli, just… elves," Brynja answered falteringly. Nobody lied to Emli.

"Elves?" Emli's brow raised with almost elegant suspicion.

"Meisar says Lord Elrond would provide us some food while we are resting in their Homely House. But I hear they eat grass and nothing else. That's why they're so thin."

"They eat onions and lentils too," Meisar said. "And... leaves. Big green leaves. Lettuce."

Emli chuckled. "Rather eat meat and have a tad on me. Elves. What foolishness." She floated off, satisfied for the time with the answer. Brynja exhaled, relieved when she was gone, but Meisar sighed out of her sight with more worry than before.

II

"Your lips are swollen, my lady," Gyda observed when they had stopped in the afternoon to water the ponies and eat.

"You've been kissed," Siv said more bluntly.

"Kissed?" Emli whooped suddenly. "By whom?"

"I have not…!" Meisar protested in a high whine as the dwarrowdams quickly gathered around. The unfamiliarity of so many eyes on her riled her cheeks to an all-betraying flush. "I bit my lip in the night; that is all."

Bofur kept silent, but he was grinning against his whittling. Meisar shifted edgily.

Urdlaug, as wide about the hips as a wagon, pattered through the gathering. Her broad button nose twitched in Meisar's direction. She was her father in all but her countenance, stodgy and meddlesome. "What is this I hear about kissing?" the dwarrowdam demanded. "There's been enough of that on this road," she humphed, eyeing Brynja and Siv.

"I have certainly not been kissed," Meisar said gruffly.

"He's handsome," purred Siv. "And you are not… so bad."

"King Thorin?" asked Lulia.

"Don't be a blockhead!" Urdlaug scolded her sister.

"Are you mad? I'm not… there's no one," Meisar insisted again.

"You are all wrong!"

The dwarrowdams all snapped around to Bofur as the words left his lips. Meisar held her breath as the dwarrowdams narrowed their eyes at him suspiciously. Bofur twisted his hands nervously around the handle of his sturrock. "Well… any dwarf who was courting her, of course he would have braided her hair!" Bofur said finally, nodding vigorously.

_A cockerel in their little henhouse_, thought Meisar, suddenly amused at Bofur's discomfort.

"Yes. Yes Bofur that is correct," chirped Emli finally after a tense silence amongst the dwarrowdams. "When a dwarf woman is courted, that is the way it is done. Always. When she has accepted his offer of a proper courtship, he makes a braid in her hair."

Emli strode to Meisar and peered down at her, hands on hips, expecting some response from her. "Wouldn't know. Never been properly courted," Meisar shrugged, rolling over the "properly" with some unintended emphasis.

"Well if you are ever are, you'll know it. And so will all of us. Though it would be preferable some keep their private activities to themselves," Emli went on, eyeing Bofur and Brynja with pursed lips. "There is no secret in a courtship. Dwarves are much too possessive for that to go unannounced."

Emli gave Meisar's undecorated locks a careful once-over and turned back to the other women with a look that confirmed it. "When Gloin came to my home and asked permission to call upon me in courtship, I accepted of course, and he braided my hair right there upon my threshold. And we walked through the village together so that dwarves and men alike would know what great matter had been newly forged."

The younger dwarrowdam swooned at Emli's recall. She raised up her head proudly. "That is how a _proper _dwarf would go about that business. He only gets one chance after all. If she says no, he might very well expect never to have another. Such is the temperament and stubbornness of dwarves."

Meisar was about to excuse herself when Siv swooped in and jiggled her bosom roughly from behind.

"Siv!"

"Or is a lucky dwarf finding these fine pillows at night, braid or no braid?" purred Siv, laughing at her own boorishness. Meisar swatted her away, tugged her heavy jerkin on roughly. "No. No… pillows. Dirty-headed girl." _There was no dwarven word for slag, a shame._

"Shoo, Siv. Go on now and make yourself useful. Got bottles broke up in the wagon going rough over the land. I need the elixirs sopped up and the wagon bed scrubbed," ordered Eda.

Gyda begged off with Lulia and Virta lest they be asked to help, Brynja and Bofur drifting away too. When they were gone, Siv's eyes bored a hole at Meisar, purposefully. "Some dwarves got fingers incapable of braidin'. Used to harder work, or not thinking too hard about women when they've got enough to worry for," intoned Siv. She leaned and whispered into Meisar's ear with a wry grin. "Start reading the ones around you instead of tracks in the ground you'll see." Her black eyes knew everything and nothing.

"I'll offer Urdlaug your services if you won't do for me, cousin. Her cauldron needs a good scrubbing after the cheese and onion soup," warned Eda.

Siv left Eda and Emli with Meisar. "I am sorry for that, Meisar," said Eda.

"A dwarrowdam of such strong, immaculate character like yourself Eda. How _did_ she happen?" Emli sniffed.

"Exile is no place to be bringing children into this world. None know better than the dwarves what could come of it. No wonder we dwindled by thousands during those years, one generation to the next." Eda looked out at Siv sadly. "She was born and raised about a lot of stable boys in the Riddermark. My father and her father, my uncle Nar, made a living there off horse-shoe-making for a while. Her mother died not long after her birth, caught an infection I suppose, not the kind a dwarf would get under the mountain is as much as I know. Born on an old saddle-blanket; it's a miracle she didn't perish too. Horse-Lords weren't as cruel to dwarves as some men, not that they cared much for us for us but we got fed as a good as not starving, and paid for a harsh day's work for what it was worth. Lords made sure we had a good lot of stone to bury Nar when he died. Colt spooked, kicked the life out of him while he was forging a set of shoes for it. Suppose a dwarf is just the right height for _that. _Anyway, the ones working in the stable were kind to Siv after that. Poor babe it happen she did. Suppose a wee dwarf girl was a novelty to 'em. They certainly didn't censor themselves around her." She paused sadly again. "I brought her West with me to Ered Luin. Too late; she'd already seen 'em standing up to piss and seen what was down there. That and the girls they brought about after dark to roll about in the hay, typical peasant stock. Siv saw it all. Don't suppose she was too put off by it. Wouldn't happen amongst dwarves that much I can say. Can't do much to erase what they've seen. Memories of dwarves."

"Makes you long for the days of old, doesn't it?" sighed Emli. "Back when a dwarrowdam wouldn't leave the mountain halls. We were protected."

Eda nodded. "Yes, we were. Secreted away sometimes I think. Not for ill though. Queen Lotte was adamant about that."

"Thorin's mother?"

"Grandmother," said Emli. "I had heard in the days of exile wicked and slanderous comments from the world of men, on we dwarf women. They said that our men hoarded us away like gold, kept us prisoner in the mountain halls, and that we were miserable oppressed creatures no better off than slaves, or livestock for the slaughter! One supposes they'd never been to the marketplace in Dale."

"I am from Dale," Meisar offered quietly.

"Well why didn't I know that?' squawked Emli.

"You never asked."

Emli harrumphed, unused to being second-guessed. "Different worlds, Meisar, the dwarf women of Dale and Queen Lotte's girls under the mountain. King's Thror's wife believed more than any in the specialness of female dwarves. Treasures more precious as gold she would say. So precious no eyes ought to lay themselves upon us but our own. She made every dwarrowdam born in Erebor her ward and forbade us from ever leaving the mountain. She educated and warded over every one of us herself, from the highest born down to the miners' daughters, taught us embroidery, tapestry-making and all the properties of fine jewels, a bit of alchemy when she was in the mood, and our social graces of course. Bless her beautiful silver beard, she did not live to see what the dragon made of her precious girls."

"Sounds a bit extreme," Meisar remarked hesitantly. The memory of her old home in the round tower, the warmth of the sun in Dale's long, dry summers came back to her, the smell of spices and perfume and flowers in the marketplaces, sitting on someone's shoulders as a babe and her face squashing into the lower back of one of the tall-folk, how it had made her laugh. "You never left the mountain before the dragon?"

Eda laughed. "Of course we did. Secret doors have many purposes, and dwarf women many secrets."

Emli joined wistfully. "How Queen Lotte railed against those dwarf-women who ran their market stalls in Dale! Thought they'd be giving away their virtue and all the secrets of the dwarven ways."

"What was Thorin's mother like?" Meisar asked, even more hesitantly.

"Tania, Thorin's mother, was not a "free spirit" as they might say, a rather reserved lady as I remember, but she was practical. When Thorin and Frerin were young, Tania took them to the common-folks' markets in Dale to greet the people man and dwarf alike, teach Thorin the art of diplomacy one would say. Thrain didn't have quite the knack for everyday politics and schmoozing with the lots, bless his beard. But Tania's efforts boded well for our merchants and the goodwill we forged in those days with the peoples around Erebor. Poor Queen Lotte nearly choked when she heard."

"Did she perish with the dragon?"

"Nay. Queen Lotte died the next year and Tania did things a bit different. Dis was presented to the realm same as Thorin and Frerin when she was born. Came far and wide they did, men, elves, to see a dwarven baby girl. Thror permitted it because the Arkenstone had been found not so long before. He wanted all the realm to see that along with the little princess. Tania didn't live long after that either though. Poor lamb."

The two dwarrowdams paused and looked at each other, as if daring the other to go on.

"Thror was corrupted by many things, the gold not being the first or the last of it," Emli finally went on.

"Yes," agreed Eda. "It would have been a beautiful age had Thrain and Tania ruled together. And Thorin their crown prince. What a resplendent child too, lovely manners, big blue eyes. Quite precocious if truth be known. He had a mighty weight bearing down upon him long before he even knew it himself."

"The treasure corrupted him too. What makes you think it would have been any different?" Meisar queried unhappily.

"I don't know," Emli said. "Just a feeling I had, all those years ago, even as a small girl. Now that Thorin has come back to us, it remains to be seen."

"I see that he has entrusted in your many things," Emli said after a long silence. "You have become someone significant to him. And for your friendship, I am sure he is most glad."

She breathed a silent sigh of relief out of Emli's view but Emli's eyes were on her again, hawk-like, but somehow unthreatening.

"I think you are a woman who has seen many unfortunate things herself. Or why would you go into the wilds alone?"

"Emli, please."

"Hence, why the king takes to your company so. You may just have that in common. It is good for him. He is much alone inside. That I know. Now more than ever."

"I will do my best," Meisar assured, quietly.

"It wasn't always like that. Not in those days under the mountain. May they return, even in a small way," mused Emli.

"What times they were," Emli breathed, half a wistful weeping.

Eda patted her shoulder. "Never dreamed a little dwarf girl might be born in a barn far from home. I'd take the stifling mountain halls over that any day, if only for her sake. She deserved better." Eda looked close to tears when she spoke of her cousin.

"You have made a valiant effort with that one, Eda. I commend you."

"A healer has the patience of a maiar and the stomach of a whore. It was meant to be. She may be crass, but I think sometimes she is true, in the dwarvish way."

Emli smiled thinly. "All that may be true. Still, keep her away from my Gimli."

III

"You ask me to speak of happier times." Meisar shifted as Thorin entered quietly behind her, at the gloaming of the day when camp was made. He carried a small bundle wrapped in dusty evergreen velvet. "If my mind cannot articulate, my hands remember." Setting the bundle upon the grass he unwrapped it- a harp, small and light enough to carry. The instrument was old, carved of the finest mahogany with emeralds embedded into its crest. He put his fingers carefully to the strings, and sang in a deep, contemplative lilt that carried effervescent on the dusk. She could feel the strings reverberating with his voice, mimicking the long, slow rumble of it.

And he sang

_The world was fair, the mountains tall_

_In Elder Days before the fall_

_Of mighty kings in Nargathrond_

_And Gondolin who now beyond_

_The Western Seas have passed away._

_The world was fair on Durin's Day._

When he was finished he closed his eyes and dreamily bowed his head just a bit. He then set the harp back in the velvet. "That was beautiful, my king," Meisar said softly.

"My grandfather taught me both blacksmithing and music. He considered it of great importance for a young prince to harden his fingers both at a forge, and against the strings of a harp."

"He taught you well then."

"My grandfather was not fond of bloodier business. Erebor was a genteel kingdom under his rule. Not only craftsmen thrived there, but engineers, mathematicians, makers of music and stout mead. Our craftsmen were revered in all corners of this world, and Erebor was home to the greatest of them."

Meisar took Thorin's hand and examined with her touch, feeling the thickness of his fingers and their careful strength, the calluses in his palms and at his fingertips. His hands were beautiful though, beautiful, capable of so much more than they let on from the outside.

"Can you play?" he asked.

"No."

He shifted behind her, and he took both her hands in his and enclosed them around the harp. He ghosted his fingers over hers and guided them to pluck a simple tune. He cared for this instrument; the strings were still taut after a century and a half, the wood without a nick or blemish upon it. _If only he cared for his own heart as he cared for these things. _She could feel his warmth at her back.

"We were craftsmen first, warriors when we were called to be," Thorin mused.

"And musicians?"

He turned her head to face him and could see she was hiding her smile. _She was pretty when she smiled, unbearably radiant._

"_Sanzigil_," he said. "It means mithril."

"I see, my king."

"Mithril is a rare thing, my lady. Stronger than dragon's hide. It can survive the onslaught of flame."

"Yes, my king." Where once her heart had pounded in her chest, it dropped instead, into the place where that flutter disturbed her thoughts and made her body weak. _Sangizil. Only but a gem. _She knew what he had lusted for, what had destroyed him. Her body stiffened as she felt his fingers in her hair, loosening a section of one of her braids.

It tugged at her scalp, his clumsy thick fingers, but she cared not for it. Had she the urge to pull away, it was as if her body would not allow it at all. "Crafters of many beautiful things," he went on, his voice somehow different, gentle but determined. "And not just from stone. We traded weapons, jewels for exotic woods and carved beautiful furniture from it. We made flutes, horns, drums from the skin and bones of the livestock we bartered our crafts and our riches for. There was always music under the mountain."

"Tell me of Erebor. Tell me more," she whispered, half-pleading.

"In Erebor," he said, "there were craftsmen of many kinds. Not just in making fine things you could hold in your hand, but the very city itself. We were engineers and artisans alike. Learned in physics and chemistry and the mathematics. How else do you build a city within a mountain?"

"I suppose you would have to know what you are doing." Her breath had started to shorten inexplicably. She could feel Thorin's gaze on her darken.

"You think my grandfather a corrupted pitiable figure?"

Meisar nodded no against Thorin's forlorn eyes. "The tales I have heard are that he was a king of much bounty, and that he fought bravely to his last moments."

"A king of much bounty? Indeed. His hunger for wealth was what it was and it brought about our destruction. He was mad with his lust for treasures. I watched him each day grow sicker with it and the Arkenstone turn his pride to malice. But I also watched him as he walked the breadth and length of the kingdom every day, visiting every workshop and forge. I watched his scribes write the needs and the input of even the lowliest-born miner, and my grandfather honored each with diligence. He presented his laundresses and kitchen-wenches with rings and necklaces of gold for their service; he knew their names and inquired after their families. He visited the sick and comforted the grieving. There was no poverty in those days, no hunger. All toils were richly rewarded."

"It sounds very much like a paradise, of many beautiful things. And peoples."

"Ah, yes. We made beautiful things. We make beautiful things." He deftly, yet so gently, untangled the loose ribbon of hair and began to plait it.

"What are you doing, my king?" she trembled.

"It is only a simple thing, but I made it for you." He brought the braid around to her front and followed to sit before her. The hair bead was ordinary stone, brilliantly white though, smoothed and polished as only a man with knowledge of precious rock could achieve.

She studied in the intricate engraving carved into the bead of stone. "This is your emblem my king," Meisar half-gasped.

"The oaken shield, yes."

She clutched the end of her braid tight in her fingers. "Should I wear your emblem upon my person, it means then… we are courting. Properly. Am I mistaken?"

"No, you are not mistaken."

A firm hand turned her chin and came to rest on her cheek. He drew the roughened tip of his thumb over the bare skin, soft and unthreatening, like the skin of a peach. "Will you allow me… to court you properly?" he asked again, with a hint of nervousness edging his voice. Oh he tried to hide it, so hardened by his travails of the world, strengthened by burden, and undone by _this_.

She answered him quiet as a chamber of stone long abandoned. _"Yes."_

She rolled the bead in her fingers and studied its craftsmanship with admiration. "You have the passion of a dwarf. Your hands make something beautiful of something that… never was. Something rough and jagged and insignificant."

"We dwarves are made and born in darkness, in our mountain halls. Do you have any idea how brilliant that sight is to a young child living under a mountain, that light? Great naves and halls filled with golden light."

Thorin kept braiding her hair so that only the small courtship braid was left out loose. The other two plaits he wrapped snugly around her cranium, twining them into a small bun at the nape of her neck.

He had just clasped the end of her braid with it when she felt his callused hand snake around the side of her neck and grasp, turning her head backward and kissing her with forceful passion. She moaned half-heartedly into his mouth.

"I would have no other look upon you and see what I see."

"And what is that." She skimmed her own fingers from the nape of her neck to its side. She was no longer frightened.

"My lady. The king's lady."

_A king's lady. _King of lost kingdom long pined for. A throne that was his by birthright reclaimed in blood and fire, awaited him there. And his poor grim sister the Princess Dis, a widow and-

_There was no word for a woman who had lost her children. _

Perhaps it was too painful to dream up, such a word. The future panged at her, what would happen when they came to Erebor, if she would ever have to look into that poor woman's eyes. The thought frightened and consumed her with an inexplicable grief just to think of it in passing, as if she were her own kin. Tales had been told her of Princess Dis's distinctly dwarven grace that was upheld as a young girl turned sturdy mother and wife in exile. How her younger son had been the one to inherit the Durin coloring, but took a bit of ribbing for his lack of a majestic beard as to befit his Longbeard title. So young after all. Had he lived beyond the zeitgeist of his early manhood, would it have grown with him? Would Thorin let his own grow now, revered as he was for cropping it in memory of those who did not survive either the dragon or the battles that came after?

Mayhap would keep it short for all times, in memory of one who never had the chance to see his own grow long. And thus, she finally let herself to think, it was appropriate after all that a beardless woman, pored singed by fire or a fluke of nature, had sat patient and trembling as he made his emblem of courtship in her hair. There was no going back now.


	18. ULKHUD

**Ulkhud- Greater Light**

**A/N: TERRIBLE writers' block this particular week, in trying to sort out precisely what it is I wanted for this chapter. I apologize for the lack of update over the weekend. And I would like to sincerely thank every one of my followers/favorites and those who have been kind enough to review (even multiple times!) I appreciate each and every one of you so very much.**

"A raven-head today, are we?" trilled Emli, making her rounds about the morning camp, in search of gossip, and breakfast perhaps. Meisar's hair was piled and wrapped over in a velvety black turban that made her look as if she were carrying a bucket of coal upon her cranium. Silly, she knew, but she was not ready, not yet.

She had woken before dawn and roused Bofur and Brynja awkwardly from their embraces, begging a stole of linen. Brynja had rose up on her elbows, too cheerfully for having been disrupted before dawn from their nest of furs and cloaks (_but that was Brynja, sweet girl_). She'd giggled as Bofur, without a care for their audience, kissed all up and down her broad, naked back and drew his fingers about her sides and her breasts as she rummaged through her textile chest, and gave Meisar a fine swath of dark velvet. And she had gone to her bedroll, piled up her braids and tied the velvet coif snugly over her head. She caught a glimpse of herself in the little mirror on a spear's-end she used for scouting the narrow, rocky passes, how severe her face looked, how exposed and plain, without her long orange hair coming down to veil any of it. _Bygone and ugly_, she thought sadly. _Like a peasant's drawn old widow in her wimple, not a king's lady, even a king who had known penury._

"And what kind of dwarf are you covering that lovely hair?" Emli patted the back of her head heavily, bringing her to the present startlingly again. The weight of her hair underneath the covering made her head wobble unsteadily when Emli had finally relented.

"An elixir… for my scalp. It must set," she lied quickly and flimsily. She ran her fingers along her hairline, restlessly tucking the stray hairs beneath it. Emli's stared down her precocious button-tipped nose at her, as her fingers fidgeted nervously to readjust the coif.

"It is itchy. Eda made me a… thing. For it."

"Wrapped in velvet it better be good," Emli observed, her ingratiating smile ever purposeful.

She sighed against Emli's prying eyes long enough and cleverly enough for Gimli to fully wake from where he had been stirring actively nearby. His mother was quickly on his case to comb his beard, eat heartily before the day's travels, and check his mail for rust and his breeches for rips, from the time his eyes opened.

When she was finally gone it was Hegi who then ran up behind her and tapped lightly at her head, alas with her mining pick, stupid with laughter. "Coal!" she crowed. "Blue Mountain coal black as midnight! Put your head in my furnace! Warm me through winter!"

"Hegi!" Meisar groused. "Not with the sharp end!"

"_Numûm__!"_ cackled Hegi in protest, her grin too knowing for comfort. "_Just a little kiss._" She clucked her tongue and winked and went on laughing. Meisar waved her off testily before Emli could catch wind of the commotion and return to investigate further.

Soon Thorin came about looking for her and gave her covered hair a subtle, doleful loo, Dwalin beside him and waving a steel-girded hand in Donbur's direction. Gimli, Nori and Ori tried to scatter but were caught in the cross-hairs of Dwalin's survey. "Come lads. Let us find some meat."

Donbur sat and picked his teeth languidly and waited for Dwalin to escalate to raising Grasper at him, before he hauled himself heavily to his feet, grumbling. "Get yer bow and yer ax. Haven't a jiffy to wait around."

Thorin let him give the orders and manage the nagging of the mostly unenthusiastic hunting party, Freyda being the only willing volunteer. He raised a long bundle when he caught Meisar's eye again, and she recognized it as her own kit. "Your hunting knives, shepherdess. May I?"

She bowed her head agreeably, feeling both Hegi and Siv's eyes on her, intent as Emli's and less unawares. "Of course my king."

He hauled himself up onto Minty the Second's saddle. "Lead them on. We will hunt in the woods north and await you there," came his command. Mounted, in passing, he dipped his head customarily toward her. "I left you one of mine in your pack, _dunininh._ Should you need it," his eyes lingered at her with purpose.

She found what he wanted her to find in her saddlebag. By the time she had managed to get away from any of the dwarrowdams (_all in need of something, all the time_) she summoned Brynja with a clandestine nod to her side. Ever faithful, Brynja gave all appearances that their conversation was private and tense, when she followed her to her horse's flank.

It was not a fine talisman as he had gifted her already that was left there at the bottom of her bag, but it was freshly and hurriedly carved, a single stone with a single rune. She ran her fingers over it, cherishing, her eyes cloudy for a moment lost in her own, jubilantly secret world.

"What does it say?" Brynja inquired eagerly.

"_Tonight."_

II

"You are certain they are sleeping?" she asked in a whisper.

He unwrapped the dark coif from her head, braids intact beneath it. A relieved smile half-formed had partially formed on his severe, elegant lips, before he took the end of her long braid and raised the stone to his lips to kiss it, reverently. "I am quite certain. Brynja and Bofur are on watch. It seems they volunteered."

He was glad to have seen her smile at that. They stood far away from the camp in the dark, not even a torchlight between them, only the full moon. Its light made the silver in his hair gleam. She stood, coming up and off again from her toes, facing him, his head bowed, his hands clasped at her waist and hers pressed up to his shoulders. She had worn the green dress for him, and plainly. She could feel the heaviness of his hands through the travel-rumpled linen. He smoothed the wrinkled fabric over the zaftig curves of her hips and the little dips of her waist, which felt solid but soft in that feminine way he had long forgotten, or never truly learned at all.

"It moves so quickly my king, all of this." He had begun to bring his hands cautiously about to feel her stout, voluptuous belly, intent on inching north, but thought better of it then. He kept his hands firm on her hips, allowing the heady electricity of such contact ripple through him, settle in his skin and his bones and nerves.

"I do not mean to alarm you, my lady," he said ruefully.

She ducked her head shyly before him. _My Lady. To hear these words leave your lips…_

He raised her up to look at him again with a hand on her cheek. She nodded delicately into the calluses in his palm, so roughened and hard, but cradling her so gently there. "Emli says all courtships are public affairs. Would I… that it would not be so, not yet."

"Have you second thoughts?" Thorin asked with a hint of uncertainty and fear in his voice. There was a sad anticipation in his eyes for what the answer might have been.

She moved her hands slowly over his, loosening her hold and then securing it again, with determination. "I have given you my answer. For all in the world, I would not change it."

To see him smile was a beautiful sight to her. His smile was always a bit sad and it made him look vulnerable, though sweet, and kind alas. _Yes, it was still alive in him. _

"I take you with a willing heart, to be by your side in... in... courtship. But I am not ready, just yet. Forgive me if it offends you."

He fixed his eyes at the embroidered neckline where her bosom lay unhindered just beneath. He studied her form, the shape of her every curve, how beautiful she was to him, this unassuming woman, so middling to other eyes.

"It does not offend me."

"I am their guide. I should appear to be that, so much as I can, and do my duty to these dwarves. I am but a lone woman with only my honor to my name. If I should lose that in the eyes, then I am forsaken of all things in this world."

"You will never be forsaken of me. I promise."

_Promise. In whispered tones they said he had made a promise before and-_

She drew her breath again, smoothed that rogue strand of hair back from his forehead, and ran her fingers timidly along the braid at his right temple, fingering it like a prayer bead. "Not for all the world would I deny you. It would be denying myself." She brought herself to look up into his eyes in the dark, watch the way the blue orb descended down into the corner to glimpse at her fingers caressing his hair, peaceful, but with a peculiar yearning behind it. She could feel a heat in him grow, the skin of his neck suddenly hot to her touch as her fingers brushed at its curve. He took such pride in his hair, such care and precision in those simple braids, his hair so abundant in length though not nearly as abundant as her own. What patience it took to make _that _braid. When she had let him plait it, his fingers were half-numb by the time he'd reached the bottom.

Her hands slid and fingers wound 'round to bury themselves in his hair in grasping to cradle his neck just behind his ears, the heels of her palms on his jawline. "You are a king. I should be all things to you, without half a world of uncertainties still to face."

He brought her even closer, nudging her by the small of her back into him, her thumb still languidly, timidly caressing the bare part of his cheek. "It is not the only uncertainty in you, is it, my lady?"

She nodded with heavy eyes drawn, before resting her head wordlessly to the fur draped across his chest, took in his solidness, the touch of his hair's ends against her cheek that made her skin all around there tingle like an itch she could not scratch. His warm, familiar, masculine smell, the rumble of his chest in a moment of uncertainty took her to an unfamiliar place, that made her feet feel as if there were naught but air beneath them.

He tipped her up in want of an answer.

"No. But such is the world, an uncertainty. I am sure of only one thing: that by asking me in courtship, you have done me such honor that I could never dream. Though it is not for honor that I have accepted."

"No?"

"I have taken you into my heart now, as I have not another before you. You can be assured of that, if nothing else in this world is certain."

"Truly?" His voice was low and disbelieving, but hopeful, in that vulnerable way.

She raised her head upward and stood on her toes to lay a chaste kiss upon his cheek. "Yes, my king."

"Thorin," he corrected her quietly. "Please. I wish to be only Thorin to you."

"Yes. Thorin..." It felt dreamy on her tongue, sharp and noble. She let herself sink into him again, aching for _his _protection (_but from what?), _strong-ligamented he was, hewn as rough as an uncut diamond. Could those jagged edges be smoothed, she wondered? Dwarves could shape the jagged edges of the roughest stones into something of polished, unmatched beauty, carve cities out of solid rock.

_And what of kings once thought made of stone, inside as well as out? So easily broken for all their hardness?_

He kissed her head. "You have brought me a contentment of being in this time, which I cannot fathom. But I trust it."

"Perhaps we were made for each other's company then. As only we can understand."

Silently, he leaned his nose against her forehead and lingered, heavily. Something that lay hidden beneath that stormy brow-line, felt altogether out of character, but whatever his character had encompassed before that quest, and subsequent battle, it had taken on a new dimension now, and she felt powerless to interpret it.

"It seems…" she began with timidity, trying to put a thought into words that her mind had never afforded her lips the opportunity to speak. "I have learned because of you to comfort, and perhaps I shall learn to be... comforted myself."

He peeled her hand from his cheek and drew the palm to his lips to kiss ardently and reverently. How much he wanted to give her that comfort. He tried to remember the engulfing hugs and songs he had soothed Fili and Kili with, through their travails. But they had been children, kin and blood. He tried to remember what it felt like to love them so fiercely his life would be gladly forfeit in place of their own _(but it had not been. The young did not bury the old, no, no, no)_. As his head pounded with a wave of fresh grief, he pulled the woman tightly to his chest again. She shivered against the harsh exhalation of hot breath into her hair, and held on, held on to him as if she would never let him go.

"What are we doing, Thorin Oakenshield? Where are we going from here?"

.

"...He has come back to us, brother, is all I know for certain." Balin warmed his hands over the fire. Dwalin peered out into the darkness in search of Thorin. Eyes shot to his empty bedroll and then to Meisar's.

"Slips out when he think we are asleep. Don't suppose it's to make water," grumbled Dwalin.

"He has come back to us, for what reason I cannot fully understand or fully rejoice for yet, for I know not what it is. But I am certain it is for some good."

"Reason? To rule his kingdom! To have at last what is ours… and in peace."

"There will never be peace!" Balin shot back suddenly. "That mountain is a tomb. What will he find there but the shadow of death, even if he does rule over it? The shadow of death is king under the mountain, and it is a kingdom of ashes no matter how it glitters… unless… unless."

"He has his sister," murmured Dwalin hesitantly, against his brother's uncanny outburst which had sputtered off in frustration. "Is that not reason enough, to see that she is not alone in this world?"

"Alone in this world she is no longer, but you know as well as I that her grief is too much for either of them to bear, and they will only add to each other's. He may rule, but with great sorrow all the days of his life."

"Aye." Dwalin snapped the stick in his hand over and over again until it was splinters, against a tide welling up in his throat and his eyes.

Balin peered off into the distance again. He noted Meisar's hounds, their ears pricked in a certain direction, awake and restless, dutifully remaining at her bedroll. Something was afoot, though the old dwarf could barely bring himself to ponder the possibility, the opening of _that _door. He had seen her eyes, a certain innocence in spite of her hardness of affect, so plain to see she _must _have been ignorant any alternative to it. _It_ had chewed at his conscience for many days, and had ventured outside the realm of Dwalin's overly suspicious notions. "Is it worth returning to a life for? Is it? I wept to think him dead; now I weep to think him alive."

"No use weeping," scowled Dwalin. "He needs pillars of steel, not rivers of tears."

"He needs more than that." Balin looked off into the night again. "He needs more than _that_."

III

Come morning a mighty rain was falling. Woken by the snarling sound of thunder, dwarves scurried and scowled to their ponies and wagons, caught off guard by the downpour just after daybreak. Meisar put the cloak of her hood up to cover her hair and half her face with it. _Mahal makes all things as they are meant to be, when they are meant to be _she reminded herself, with some relief. She watched the darkest clouds roll ahead in the sky and with them the thunder, a rumble in the distance gradually fading away. Clouds like pale ash were left, dropping a cool rain.

Each of the dwarves were so wet and miserable by the time they made camp late in the afternoon they did not notice that her hood never came down, and she slunk around the camp with her cloak dripping on the ground behind her. It was early and the sky was finally clear and if they settled now she reasoned, the rain would move far ahead of their traveling range by the morn.

Urdlaug unloaded a wagon-full of dirty dishes and summoned each of the dwarrowdams in no uncertain terms down to the rain-fattened stream to help with the wash. Brynja scudded over to Meisar's side and took her arm-in-arm. The young newlywed beamed with satisfaction when Meisar didn't jerk away from her familiarity. "Your secrets are always safe with me, _dunininh_. Don't worry," she whispered.

_It was only a matter of time then_, Meisar deduced silently, keeping a pained, painted smile for her. "Thank you." She patted her arm quietly. "I am quite happy that… you and Bofur have found your marriage so… satisfying." Brynja blushed behind the back of her raised hand, pressed down at her lower lip and chin to hide her flushed, beaming visage, lest the unsparing eye of Urdlaug find her and scold her again for her constant reverie.

"Someday you will know, my lady," she whispered back, her eyes holding that secret knowledge with a certain glee. "If you haven't already…"

When Brynja squeezed her arm again she realized it was a question.

"No, not quite, I don't think," Meisar answered quietly, as they took up piles of dirty dishes and pots and carried them the length to the stream. They all sat in a row and went to work, the male dwarves moving carefully just out of their sight lest they be asked to join. Urdlaug strained her ears to listen at the what the two dwarrowdams set apart from the rest of their flock talking at, Brynja's words filtering through in her hushed, giggly tone.

"…Pulled up my shift and looked down at me like he'd not seen a lass before with her clothes off. Kissed me all over, told me I was more beautiful than the richest vein of Mithril or wall of gold."

"Again with _that _talk," blared Urdlaug. "Enough I say!"

Brynja flashed Urdlaug an audacious grin before turning back to Meisar purposefully raising her tone. "_Mahal _he kissed me in places I never thought you'd a lass. All before he took me and it was... officially done."

"Put it in ye is what ye mean," snorted Siv.

Brynja blushed then, suddenly. "Yes, that is it. He says that his body is made quite ready just by the sight of my smile."

"Ah, so _that's _where he put it then," smirked Siv again. The jaws of half the dwarrowdams were agape and the other half's brows raised in confusion. Urdlaug crumpled her stodgy face. "Talk like you're sitting with a gaggle of men in a brothel you do."

"Such is the world," replied Siv grimly. "Rather be a doxy lass than sweat in a forge from dawn 'til dusk for some stale bread and a pence or two." Some of the dwarrowdams grumbled resignedly, remembering the bitterer days of exile.

"Anyway," she continued, smiling wickedly again.

"Mind yourself, cousin," Eda warned.

Siv ignored her flippantly. "What I was going to say is that dwarves are big," she asserted stoutly. "Better gifted between the legs in size, than even the biggest among men, well, for their proportion anyway. It is why they are so proud and haughty I think."

Bombur's elder daughters sniffed again disapprovingly. "Well, are we not a might haughty and proud ourselves, without those parts… dangling?" argued Freyda. Urdlaug snorted like a boar and silenced them all. "It is not proper for a dwarrowdam without a One to even know such things," scolded the eldest 'Ur. "Only thing that'll be dangling is the stars in front of your eyes you don't start acting proper."

"I am in love, that is all. It's hard to keep to myself sometimes it overwhelms so how in love I am," Brynja jabbered on dreamily. "I could not ask for a husband like Bofur, so kind he is to me in every way, and handsome too."

"Well I'm still young," Siv put her legs out and crackled her knees and knuckles. "Find me one like that. Fine beard, treat me real gentle. That's what I want."

"Well you'll be searching Erebor mighty hard when we come home. Mind your tongue if you want an upstanding dwarf to woo ye," counseled Eda. "Siv raised one thick eyebrow mischievously. "Master Gimli is that upstanding, and rather handsome too."

Urdlaug snorted again loudly. "Emli would never let you near him." She too looked about edgily for the mother hen.

"Why not?" Siv snapped back, black eyes sparkling with protest. "I am as fine a dwarrowdam as ever can be found in the Seven Kingdoms."

"You're a hussy with a big mouth. And you're scrappers'-kin."

Urdlaug had her for once defeated, if momentarily. "Then I'll just have to find myself someone not-so-upstanding," grumbled Siv. Freyda patted her back and shook her head at Urdlaug with a hint of censure. "Urdlaug again, shooting down the hope of every dwarven lass from here to the Iron Hills," she chuckled.

"Urdlaug's just bitter because her love interest didn't return the favor," muttered Virta. "She wants everyone to be alone and miserable with her."

"I didn't know blueberry butter cake could reciprocate," Siv quipped.

"You shut your mead-spout!" Urdlaug snarled. Siv stood up to face her and put her hands on her hips, full of reckless audacity. "My beard is finer than any. My hips are big, my bosom bigger, and my legs are strong. And I can drink with the best of them," Siv proclaimed. Urdlaug unfolded her clenched arms and picked up a heavy pan by the handle. Siv put out her chest a little further. "Why, my beard is even fuller than King Thorin's," she added self-effacingly.

"Calm yourselves, all of you," Meisar chided. "It's no use getting yourselves so worked up for nothing. And speaking of the king's beard beside your own is not becoming, Siv."

"He cropped it years ago in memory of those who were lost and destroyed," explained Emli, barging into the circle. "If only such noble gestures were not unknown to the likes of you. You might learn something."

Siv sat down and continued with her work. "Besides, I may come from humbler roots than Master Gimli, but is not a king courting a mere shepherdess. Why, you're more like the Rangers among men that you are a dwarrowdam, Meisar."

"Oh you speak such nonsense Siv," scolded Eda. "And of a king no less."

Brynja's eyes bulged at Meisar, silently and madly proclaiming her innocence. The shepherdess set her face stonily and looked determined. Brynja reached and desperately squeezed her hand and she responded in kind, with uncanny assurance.

"It's not a competition, lass, this business of being a dwarf," Freyda parried coolly. "We ought to be sticking together. And besides, we were all like Rangers once, out in the wilderness, trying to survive."

"We stick together perfectly, like old molasses. And that is why we drive each other mad," Eda observed, chuckling wisely. "You'll forgive my cousin Siv. She is young and reckless with her words." She nudged an obstinate and intent Siv. "Isn't that right, cousin?"

"Wait! WHAT ABOUT MY GIMLI!?"

"Quiet as a mouse, Meisar. Quiet folk have the most secrets."

"Then they are secrets for a reason," scolded Eda. "Let it be, Siv."

"WHAT ABOUT MY GIMLI!?"

Meisar shut out Emli's rising perturbation against her better instincts. _Let her take care of that foolhardy girl, let her. It would be such a sight after all. _But she felt as if something inside her would burst, unless, _unless-_

"It is true though," Meisar's voice came back quietly into the rising fray. None heard her.

"It is true!" she shouted. Her heart pummeled at her ribs as she pushed back the hood of her cloak and shook out her braids to the confused dwarrowdams who had all turned to look at her. She took the courtship braid with Thorin's distinct emblem clasped to its end and held it out.

"It is true," she repeated. The dwarrowdams dropped their dishware.

"Show us!" Emli demanded. She felt as if the women were pecking at her the way the flesh raised in tiny bumps all along her limbs. _Like chickens,_ she thought,_ with their feathers all ruffled._

"Well?" Emli harrumphed finally. "Have you accepted?"

"I have told Thorin… the king… that I am fond of his company."

"She's accepted!" squealed Gyda.

"Yes. Yes I have."

Emli dropped to her knees and hugged Meisar tight. She rested her hands on Emli's elbows and basked in the jubilation in her eyes. She had expected something far starker.

"Goodness gracious, in all my years I never thought I would see the day!" Emli clapped her hands excitedly. "Thorin Oakenshield courting! And a fine lady, a fine lady!"

"A fine lass indeed!" added Freyda, her smile too wide for her face. She and all the dwarrowdams embraced and kissed her cheeks in turn in congratulations. Yet she was unnerved by the attentions of the women, even now. They were each loyal, even familial, though Meisar avoided the closeness some had with each other. Emli held Meisar's face on either side of her jaw, the sharp, pale green eyes checking her skin, patting her up and down as if she were a jewel under a scope. Emli was the daughter of a diamond merchant who had served loyally at the court of King Thror, an expert appraiser in her own right.

"Surely Oin can make a potion for the windburn on those cheeks. You're ruddy. Got to figure out a way to make you rosy."

"Asked her hand in courtship the way she is. Let 'er be!" said Freyda.

"I've got something for that!" Eda chirped in turn though, rummaging through her leather apothecary case. "A ground potion to be applied to the skin to keep it smooth and firm. That is what the lasses among men do to keep their youth."

"You seem some of the likes of them? Give me what the elves use, then I'll be convinced," Siv scooted over to join the ruffle of dwarrowdams that had crowded around the seated shepherdess.

"Immortality," imparted Freyda sarcastically. "Lack of honor is good for crow's feet too I hear."

Meisar's heart had stopped pounding long enough to come back to the immediacy of the present and realize where they were on the map she had now messily marked their itinerary on in soot. "Now, now, watch your words in the days to come. By next night we ought to be in Rivendell."


End file.
